The recent efforts by Heather Mees and the Citizens for Responsible Government to recall the mayor are just silly. I don’t agree with their politics, I don’t agree with their strategy and I don’t agree that the mayor should be recalled. And I was beginning to think that I disagreed with their claims that based on information they received from the city that only Ira Sharenow and 61 other people had contacted us about the smoking debate. There was definitely something wrong with the information the newspapers had printed about her
You see, during the smoking debate, I had started keeping a tally of new individuals who contacted me about the smoking issue. My information was telling me that I had 262 contacts between July 20, 2005 and September1, 2005. I didn’t finish counting after September 1 because the trends were staying about the same and I ran out of time. During the time period I tracked, I had 45 contacts from people in my district and 67% of them supported the smoking ban. I had 88 contacts from people in the city but outside of my district and 59% of them supported the smoking ban so that city-wide I had 133 contacts and 62% of the people who contacted me that I knew were from the City of Madison supported the ban. 77% of the 43 people who contacted me from outside the city supported the ban. And the last category – people who did not leave an address was made up of 86 people and there only 40% supported the ban. Overall totals were that of the 262 contacts I had, 51% supported the ban. And yet she was claiming that we had only be contacted by 61 people. Something smelled. Was Heather mis-representing what they found? Had the newspaper gotten it wrong? Did something go wrong with the program that the CRG used to analyze the data? Did she get the right information? Honestly, they all were distinct possibilities.
It was bugging me so much, I went an got a copy of the information she was given. With about 35 minutes of work, I was able to figure it out. I thought I was in for a very long evening when I discovered that of the 6135 e-mails that she received 5385 contained the word/phrase “district 2”. It turns out, that when you eliminate the duplicates, there were only 447 e-mails. And of course, 349 of them were to or from Ira. That only left 98 e-mails. At this point, I knew enough that I didn’t look at the rest, she clearly had not received the right information.
Apparently, Ms. Mees subsequently submitted an additional open records request, and the city admits that there was some sort of oversight. Staff are saying that they did not search for the correct information, but if they had searched for “district 2” and “smoking” they should have found all of my e-mails.
Now the alders are being told they have to take several hours out of their work day (most of us have full-time jobs in addition to being an alder) and go review the information themselves during times when the IS staff is working. I’m particularly annoyed because we had gotten so much e-mail during the smoking debate that I separated them all into their own folder and they should be easy to find. And since the city archives all the information, I didn’t bother to keep track of it in any other fashion. I relied on the archiving system to work properly so that we didn’t need to worry about keeping our own records.
This whole thing is just bothersome. When a citizen, for whatever reason, submits and open records request, the public should have confidence that they have received the correct information. One of the keys to making a democracy work, should be the transparency of the government. The public has a right to know what influences our decisions. And hopefully, this all gets straightened out quickly and in the future, the public will be given the correct information. I called Heather to tell her the same thing.
