 |
CAMBER |
|
|
|
Lease RFP Committee - Meeting #2
Meeting #2 – March 10, 2006
Geof Cahoon, Peter Richards, Joe Pezzillo and I attended 2nd meeting, the first open meeting, of Boulder's RFP Evaluation Team this morning, March 10th.
Thanks again to Geof for getting them to open that door, at least a bit! Persistence is important.
I asked for the courtesy of letting the members of the public who showed up to be allowed some brief remarks. They gave us 5 minutes apiece.
Among other things, we asked why there weren't representatives on the team from the most consistently involved voting-related citizens groups, or independent computer security experts, or representatives of the Green party (which outnumbers Libertarians nearly 2-to-1 in the county).
Liss stressed their efforts to achieve broad representation in a reasonably-sized committee, though later noting that they did end up with an empty seat, and an even number (bad for resolving disagreements) after ACLU declined.
I also emphasized the sadness of their expansive focus on protecting the proprietary secrets of the vendors, the need to look at the other options for meeting the HAVA requirements, the need for changes in the existing Hart scanning system to support actual audits, the continued need for specs on the ballots of the Hart system so other printers will be willing to bid, etc.
Shelley Bailey, Assistant County Attorney, did a good presentation of the Open Meetings laws, which she and Liss had agreed to follow yesterday after some discussion. But that still leaves lots of room for "executive sessions" in which the public is excluded, as allowed by CRS 24-6-402(4), which notes that the committee may meet in an executive session only to consider seven sorts of things, including: “Purchase, Sale or Lease of Public Property”.
Most of today's meeting was open, until about 11:40.
There was a discussion of whether to ask Hart if it was all right to open the demo up to the public, but without an opportunity for the public to ask questions. 3 members wanted two demos, one for just the team, and the other for the public. The rest wanted to combine the two, and just have the team to go into executive session if necessary. That is what they voted to do, and Josh will ask Hart about it.
They can't make any decisions in executive session. But I didn't wait until after it was over to see if they took any more votes.
Neal McBurnett http://bcn.boulder.co.us/~neal/
|
|
CAMBER is a dedicated group of volunteers who are working to ensure that |