Take a look at the city’s agenda search page below.
City staff asked for new software to change the way we access city council agendas.
The result is that we can no longer search for things that occurred before 2014.
Neat, huh?
Opaque
Any embarrassing details about what was said or done in the past are now effectively hidden from us.
This has to be deliberate. If the new software cannot handle the old agendas, then leaving the old system up would give us access to past events.
Shameful!
We deserve better
Brutus
elpasospeak 
This is a major story. This proposal is a newspeak strategy to revise or erase history by making records inaccessible. It is a means to minimize and avoid accountability for past statements and actions. In all likelihood, this is being done because both city management and city council anticipate some problems (start with the ballpark) and do not want to make it difficult, if not impossible, for the average to reconstruct the history related to those problems.
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Then again, it could just be a [edited]-up by IT. Not the first time.
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“He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past.” — George Orwell
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This would be similar to “investing” in a new library… here’s the pitch: “step right up, ladies and gentlemen, we’ve got the deal of lifetime for you…a state of the art, better than ever, beats all comers, must have, be the first in your area to get it, latest and greatest, find anything and everything library for you”……anything published since January 2014 that is!!! And that’s the way history is rewritten to the delight of city lawyers and manipulators. I wonder how much they paid for this wonder of wonders. Access? Transparency? Bah!
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Of course they cover their A’s by saying you can always contact the municipal clerk and get whatever you want, but hope you don’t mind if we can’t find it, or if we keep track of who’s asking.. “may we have your photo ID, please.”
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“…and that will be a couple of hundred dollars, thank you very much.”
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You can always use the city’s google search to look em up
just go to the city site, go to the google search
add the following:
+”AGENDA FOR REGULAR COUNCIL MEETING”
then a search term afterwards
Or you can use +”Special City Council Meeting”
if you don’t want the pdf’s, just add -pdf.
example:
+”AGENDA FOR REGULAR COUNCIL MEETING” alcohol -.pdf
He’s an example of their agenda’s that is “not searchable”
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Thank you.
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