Here's what a few months of City Plan Commission meetings looks like (Tom Benning/The Dallas Morning News)
A Dallas City Council committee pressed city staff members on Monday for more details on a proposal to increase – but not make permanent – the retention of recordings of key city board and commission meetings.
The city’s current policy allows for the destruction of tapes of public meetings after 90 days. But spurred by council members – and appointed officials who reviewed this year the city’s charter – city staff offered a plan that would extend that period to years.
The affected boards and commissions would include the City Plan Commission and the Park and Recreation Board, among others. The new proposed retention schedule would match those boards’ schedules, between three and 10 years, for keeping meeting minutes.
Members of the council’s budget, finance and audit committee generally supported the idea of better preserving the recordings. But anticipating that city staff will brief the full council in coming weeks, council members said they simply needed more information.
How much would it cost to store the recordings – all of them? How much is the city already spending to retain these kinds of records? Why did the city’s policy shift to 90 days in the first place? What’s the expected lifespan of various storage formats?
“You can see the passion there,” said council member Jerry Allen, who chairs the committee. “So those questions really need to be addressed and looked into.”
The city’s retention policy has been under special scrutiny since the city’s Charter Review Commission raised the issue. The group, which meets once a decade to recommend charter changes, raised concerns about losing key records and history.
The city policy does comply with state law. Meeting minutes for key boards and commissions are kept for longer periods of times. And the city is already preserving recordings of City Council meetings, with audio recordings going back the late 1960s.
But one commissioner – attorney Mike Northrup – described the policy as a “conveyor belt leading to a furnace.” And the commission recommended that the charter be changed to require the permanent retention of recordings for key boards and commissions.
Mayor Mike Rawlings and others agreed that the issue needed to be examined, but the council decided a city code change made more sense than a charter change. But with the debate now fully underway, the city has stopped the destruction of such recordings.