Our guest today was Sue Stoneman, Santa Rosa’s City Clerk. She defined her role this way: To serve the public, Council and staff, and facilitate the exchange of information between all.

Her main areas of activity are in Public Records/ Public Information; Council Legislative support; Filing Official for the Fair Political Practices Commission; and in Elections. We noted the fact that Sue’s job as official City Clerk only happened as a result of the last Charter Change process. Before that, the City Manager was legally the City Clerk, even though he didn’t do all the work.

She spoke about recent efforts to examine records storage: to weed out the huge amount of records unnecessarily kept, and convert to digital form those that need storing. Improvement of the city’s website now allows viewing of historical documents such as the “streaming video” of every Council meeting. Those videos will be maintained indefinitely, allowing for research at a later date.

Sue described the process of creating the weekly Council agendas. On the Monday 8 days before a meeting, every staff person with a project to present sends her material. She and the Assistant City Attorney examine the material for completeness and request other information as needed. On Thursday she and her assistant, the City Manager and the Mayor create the agenda, which comes out on Friday in printed form. Packets go to Council members that day.

The city’s website has undergone recent work. The Council agendas are expected to be available online the Friday before the meeting, as they did before, but there have been glitches in recent weeks, delaying posting. Sue said that the order of items on the agenda results pretty much from the order in which they’re received from staff.
We asked about the change to “action minutes”, rather than verbatim minutes and told her that many people were bothered that their public comments aren’t reflected in the minutes. Sue said that when the videos became available online, it was considered unnecessary to also have them written.

Sue described the new audiovisual system expected in Council chambers in late May: Improvement in the microphones, and installation of monitors in front of each Council member to allow digital information viewing, toward a future of less paper documentation. The public will see on the new, clearer overhead screen what the Council sees.

There were Brown Act questions, and Sue credited Jack Osborn with keeping after the Council on this. By new state law, any communications given to Council members within 72 hours of the meeting must be made available to the public in the binder at the front desk of the City Manager’s office (which is brought into the Council chambers during the meeting).

Sue presented us with a list of the 9 candidates, including 2 incumbents, who have filed to run for Council in November, as well as a list of election deadlines. We thanked her for her hard work and her time speaking with us.
Anne E. Seeley