This comment from Paul Freeman to an earlier article has been bumped up to a post because of its great importance in the Battle for Transparency:
“Ah, how I dream that the Asset Management meetings were actually a Committee – as indeed it really should be.
Committees are subject to legal transparency requirements – they need to be open to the public, they need to have published agendas and minutes.
But in its infinite wisdom – or as I call it hypocrisy – the council leadership have decided that the group of people who will manage the councils assets with meet in a Forum rather than a Committee, because then they don’t need to allow the public to be at the meetings and don’t need to publish agendas and minutes.
See if you can find Asset Management on the council meetings web page
http://eastdevon.gov.uk/council-and-democracy/committees-and-meetings/
But if you look here:
Click to access mtg-prog-201516-matrix.pdf
you can see the dates for the Asset Management meetings.
But if you read the EDDC Constitution which can be found at:
Click to access constitution-2014-october-.pdf
(something that the council leadership apparently doesn’t bother to do), then on page 31 it states “A Panel or Forum will normally sit in public.” (It also states “They will be an important vehicle for ensuring the involvement of the community in policy development and review”, so it is difficult to see how a closed meeting without published agendas or minutes meets this objective.)
Indeed, since it is not a committee, they don’t need to make the Asset Management Forum membership proportional to the number of councillors in each political group either. According to the minutes of the annual council in May 2015 which can be found at:
Click to access annual-council-270515-combined-mins-with-apps.pdf
on page 16 it says that the full members of this Forum are Andrew Moulding (Con.), Phil Skinner (Con.), Ian Thomas (Con.), Geoff Pook (Ind. come Con.), with Paul Diviani (Con.) and Stuart Hughes (Con.) as ex-officio members. So, despite holding 25% of the seats, there are no Independent Group councillors on this Forum at all.
Turning the Asset Management Forum into a formal Committee was a stated Aim of the East Devon Alliance candidates, and I imagine is still an objective if they can ever achieve it.
Is it any wonder that the more informed residents of East Devon think that there is a need for a fresh start at EDDC?”
East Devon Watch 