Archive for July 2016

Jefferson Healthcare Commission Meeting – 06/29/2016

In Chelan, Wa the Jefferson Healthcare Board of commissioners met in regular session following the annual WSHA conference.  Since our normal audio recording equipment does not travel with us, I recorded the meeting with my own handheld digital recorder.

To my surprise, the majority of my fellow commissioners took exception to me recording the meeting.  When I refused to stop recording the meeting, they decided to conclude the meeting rather than continue.  You can hear commissioner De Leo leave the meeting in protest of my recording.  He later rejoins the meeting at about the 5:50 mark.

As I say during this brief meeting, I make sure a recording of all meetings is made because I feel it is essential for me to do my job.  Everyone in that room needs to be held accountable for what we say- because what we say and do matters.  Without a complete record of the meetings, too much time can be spent arguing about what we agreed to or said in the past, rather than discussing actually important and difficult subjects.

I truly thought this board was done debating the issue of recording our public meetings.  A year earlier, I recorded our regular meeting in Chelan, WA in the exact same manner, but last year none of the objections raised during this year’s meeting were raised.  The recording a year ago is here.

If you listen to the recording the following are the two objections raised as best I can discern.

  1. A hospital lawyer has advised that if a commissioner records the meeting, then the recording may be argued to be an official record and therefore needs to be archived with other recordings.  The resolution to this point, as I say in the meeting and have said since this point was first raised two years ago:  I will give the recording to the hospital to store with the other recordings.
  2. The second objection seems to be referring to the board policy on recording meetings which was intentionally drafted in a way to give the board the freedom to not record a meeting if it so chooses.  The reason for this flexibility was to allow the board to meet with people off campus who might be disinclined to meet with us if we insisted on recording the meeting.  If we insisted on recording such meetings, we might hamper our ability to serve our district if our access to elected officials became more limited.  The policy in place at the time of this meeting reads as follows:

In addition to the written minutes of regular and special meetings, official audio recordings of all open public meetings may be made by board designated staff and said recordings will be processed, retained and made available in accordance with the Open Public Records Act.

Since this meeting was not with any outside entities and was merely a meeting of our board off campus, there was no reason for it not to be recorded.  So I recorded it as I did the meeting in Chelan the year prior.  Moreover, though this policy gives the board the choice to record a meeting or not, it does not take away every individual commissioners right to record the meeting if they so choose.  I continue to be unsure exactly why my fellow commissioners decided to suddenly raise these objections and refused to continue the meeting while it was recorded.  Below is the recording I made.

This website is my primary means of letting people know about my work as hospital commissioner, the issues I am working on and the specific actions I am proposing.

My goal is to make high quality healthcare affordable and accessible to every person in our community.

I love meeting with groups to discuss healthcare issues big and small. Please contact me if you would like me to join you for a talk.

Email me at mready@jgh.org

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