AGAWAM — Councilor Thomas Hendrickson has put forth a resolution to record City Council subcommittee meetings, a move he said will make them more accessible to the public and increase the council’s transparency.
“By recording the meetings, it gives people the opportunity to watch them,” he said. “If there’s an item on the agenda that they are interested in or that directly impacts them, they should be able to access a record of what was said at the meeting beyond just the minutes.”
Currently, City Council meetings are recorded, televised live and posted on the town website. By contrast, although subcommittee meetings are open to attendance by the public, the only record taken is the written meeting minutes. Hendrickson calls that the “bare minimum” and said they need to be more accessible beyond that.
In particular, he said community members are missing out on the questions, deliberations and “substantive, interesting discussion” councilors have before the full meeting starts. Had they seen those meetings, he said, they may have had a different opinion on the zone change for Shield Hotel’s 42-room boutique hotel, which the council approved in April.
In the Legislative Subcommittee meeting that preceded the full council meeting, councilors heard a presentation from the property owner and project representatives, and asked a lot of good questions, Hendrickson said.
“By the time we get to the regular meeting, we’ve already sort of hashed everything out,” he said. “I think that the public should have the opportunity to see us deliberate on that kind of stuff.”
As well, Hendrickson said it would provide “evidence and accountability” in cases where a councilor says one thing to the subcommittee and another thing to the public.
“By recording them, it at least gives us some evidence to put people on record,” he said.
The resolution Hendrickson has put forward would require the City Council to work with Agawam’s public media provider to record, televise, and upload subcommittee meetings to the city website. It does not require them to be televised live.
Hendrickson said he hoped the subcommittee meetings could be moved to the council’s main meeting space, Veterans Hall at the Agawam Senior Center, and televised live. However, the schedule of events in that space means that Agawam Media’s people would have to set up well ahead of time, he said.
“Potentially, in the future, we can go in that direction if things change,” he said.
Councilors, he said, are positive about the resolution. He said he’s heard other councilors talk about it before and he himself has been thinking about it since he was elected in 2022.
“I’m confident that it’ll pass and that the change will happen,” he said.
Should the resolution pass, Hendrickson expects the recordings to start right away. Agawam Media may also do a test run in September’s subcommittee meetings, he said.
Hendrickson expects the City Council to vote on the resolution at its Sept. 4 meeting.
