Cooper City shrinks official minutes: “Details you really don’t want the public to know about” | Broward Bulldog

According to the Broward  Bulldog, a Broward County municipality is "scrubbing" minutes. But they also have a video of all City Commission meetings, including one where two elected officials were really going at it. That tirade lasted for 12 minutes but is not reflected in the minutes of the meeting.

This issue has come up in Lake Worth before and at one point, then Commissioner Jennings decreed that the video of the meeting was the official record. However, the Sunshine Law requirement that minutes be taken of any public meeting would tend to place importance on the written record of a meeting, rather than a video.

I agree that it is difficult to find something on the video provided by the city of Lake Worth. You need to know what you are looking for and sometimes minutes of the meeting are where I go first to find something. Agendas are helpful too as you can kind of guess where in the meeting something took place. Part of my reason for making a habit of videotaping Commission meetings is that I can break sections out as distinct videos that make it easier to identify the topic being discussed.

This is from the article, click title for link.

In an interview, Greg Ross, who took over as mayor last November, noted that video recordings of commission meetings supplement the minutes. The videos are available on demand on the city’s web site and because of the videos, there was no reason for lengthening minutes, he said.
Carla Miller, founder of City Ethics, a non-profit organization that provides local governments with ethics training and programs, agreed with Ross that supplementing minutes with videos is good practice.
“If you have a video tape of it, to have 10 pages (of minutes) and not 16 pages is sufficient,” Miller said, adding that state law does not require “verbatim notes”.
But Daniel Krassner, executive director of Integrity Florida a non-profit that promotes integrity in government, was critical of Cooper City’s practice. He said recording thorough accounts of commission deliberations in the minutes “would save Cooper City residents the hassle of going through hours of videos.”
“It is important for the public to be able to understand their officials…and their decision making,”
Krassner added. “More detailed minutes offer greater public understanding of how decisions are debated and decided.”
Commissioner Sims made a similar argument in lengthy complaints to Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi in 2012 and to Broward Inspector General John Scott in 2013 where he argued that Cooper City was violating the state’s Sunshine Law.
“Trying to find what you want to watch on a three-plus hour video is a frustrating and highly imperfect process,” Sims wrote. “Unless someone tells you where to look, the Internet (video of commission meetings) in no way makes up for the bare, unlawfully taken minutes.”