Information “Worth Noting”.

There will be no public meetings in City Hall tonight. Two meetings originally scheduled have been cancelled.

The Planning & Zoning Board meeting has been rescheduled to January 16th and the next regularly scheduled Electric Utility Advisory Board meeting will be on February 6th.

But guess what!

That doesn’t mean there wasn’t something very interesting on the City’s website for “Agendas, Minutes & Action Minutes”.

Specifically, some time over the New Year’s weekend the meeting minutes for the Tree Board from February–September were posted. And interestingly from those minutes learned that Chris McVoy, PhD, seems to be getting involved once again. McVoy, a former three-term commissioner, was defeated by now-District 2 Commissioner Omari Hardy in March 2017.

If you recall, in the endorsement for Hardy the editor at the Post called McVoy a “gadfly”. Not a very nice thing at all to call an elected official.

Actually, calling any elected official a ‘gadfly’ is sort of mean-spirited.

Also interestingly, looking through the recently posted minutes from the Tree Board the Podocarpus (Podocarpus macrophyllus) seems to have become a very big issue at the board or possibly that particular issue has since been resolved. We’ll know more when the minutes from October–December are posted or by other means.

Apparently, the seven-member Tree Board meetings in May, July, August and September had no quorum (not enough voting members in attendance) and were converted to work sessions where no votes were taken.

And as duly noted by the Tree Board Chair Richard Stowe, the board secretary and board advisor David McGrew, although an official voting session did not happen the meeting minutes still have to be recorded: who was present, what was discussed and any future action to be considered.

The next Tree Board meeting will be on January 10th, 5:30, in the City Hall conference room. The board meets the second Thursday of the month and meetings are open to the public.

Here are some interesting minutes taken at the February 2018 meeting following the 13th annual Tree Festival last year:

• Festival of Trees (February 17th, 2018) exhibitors (23–25 tables needed); encourage a few exhibitors to bring tables.
• A few additional vendors including a Vegan food truck.
• Recruitment of volunteers to run Earn-A-Tree event.
• Raffle tickets will be given out after residents attend a presentation; residents sign in for a tree with a volunteer at City Tree Board table.
• Residents will then use raffle ticket to meet with one of eight native tree consultants.
• Festival posters and postcards printed by Mark Easton [The Lake Worth Herald] and designed by Nigel Holmes distributed at meeting.

Whilst on the topic of meeting minutes. . .

There are still no meeting minutes at all in 2018 for the Finance Advisory Board (aka, the “Fabulously FAB”). And there are no minutes posted in 2018 for the Library Board or the Bond Citizen Advisory Board either. Did meetings happen? Who knows.

As noted in the Tree Board meeting minutes above — even if no official meeting occurs and no votes are taken — the meeting still has to have minutes to notify the public about what happened. Or in some cases, what did not happen.

So in the spirit of the New Year,

Let’s make 2019 the Year of
Timely Meeting Minutes!