In another move toward transparency, the Denton City Council directed city staff Tuesday to reinstate individual council member vote tabulations.
Showing vote tabulations will let residents keep track of how their council members are voting on city ordinances, policies and issues.
It’s a move that city staff didn’t recommend, in part because they said would take two staff members several hours after each council meeting to make the information available online.
Staff also pointed to a city consultant’s review that found offering it was “overkill” since the city charter already requires that the information appear in the meeting minutes, according to a presentation to council members Tuesday afternoon.
Previously, the policy to make what was known as the “City Council vote chart” available online was discontinued by staff in April 2023.
“Even if it’s inadvertent, in 2024 burying data in PDFs of textual minutes is antithetical to transparent governance with well-informed citizens,” council member Brian Beck wrote in an email to the Denton Record-Chronicle on Wednesday.
“In a time when we’re developing websites, dashboards and 311 systems to keep the citizens more easily engaged and apprised of city efforts, moving away from that for voting records is contrary to those efforts and against our key priorities of pursue organizational excellence; strengthen community and surrounding region; engage with stakeholders on critical issues,” he said.
Beck originally pitched the idea to reinstate the policy at the March 19 council meeting after he discussed it with the agenda committee. He told the Record-Chronicle that concerned citizens had contacted him via social media and email to let him know they couldn’t find the council’s voting records.
The District 2 council member also said he heard verbally from people who preferred to have access to spreadsheet formatted data and struggled to understand why it had been removed.
Beck said one resident “quite eloquently but succinctly pointed out how fundamental accessibility was to transparency: could a body really be transparent if it was hidden behind layers and layers of effort to get data needed to make a decision?”
They also questioned why it would take two staff members nearly eight hours of staff time to record 11 votes per council member.
At the Tuesday work session, new City Secretary Lauren Thoden, who was hired in late April, offered a breakdown as to why staff didn’t recommend Beck’s March 19 two-minute pitch to reinstate the online voting chart.
Thoden mentioned that staff had discovered that only 244 clicks on the online voting chart had occurred since 2018. That’s about 25 clicks per year over a six-year period — if they removed 95 clicks that occurred during an outlier meeting on April 4, 2023.
Council member Chris Watts wondered what was being discussed at that meeting to cause so many people to click on the voting chart. Turns out it was the marijuana decriminalization ordinance.
Thoden said the city had also hired Mary Kayser from consulting firm City Hall Essentials to review the council vote chart in early 2023.
The consultant analyzed five key areas to determine if it was needed: meeting management, public information, records management, boards and commissions, and elections.
According to this week’s presentation, Kayser found that council members’ votes were recorded in the minutes, ordinances and resolutions and pointed out that the city charter requires only that the vote tabulation appear in the minutes.
“If council moves forward, staff recommends that a disclaimer be added to the information on the website to make clear to the public that this is not the actual vote history record,” Thoden said. “It is a tabulation of data and that the vote history [can] be found in the minutes to make sure that official citations are done properly.”
The city paid the consultant $8,490 as part of a larger review of city secretarial process and procedures, including voting tabulations, according to city staff.
“City staff is confident that the technology currently in place will significantly streamline these processes and enhance efficiency,” Kayla Herrod, the deputy director of marketing and communications, wrote in a Wednesday afternoon email.
On Tuesday, Beck suggested that the council update the city charter to include tabulating council voting data and making it available online. The council has been discussing possible updates to the charter for several weeks now.
Watts recommended that they make it a budgetary item for the city manager’s office to include as a supplement on the annual budget to help cover the costs to tabulate the data.
Council member Brandon Chase McGee, who won reelection to a second term Saturday, agreed transparency is a good idea, while council member Vicki Byrd called it a good educational opportunity for residents.
Mayor Gerard Hudspeth, who was also recently reelected, said several times during the meeting that he doesn’t have a problem with transparency but does have a problem with council members ignoring a staff recommendation. He also said that data without context “is not very helpful.”
He referred to the way this issue came before them on Tuesday as “gamesmanship” because the agenda committee — which consists of Hudspeth, Beck and City Manager Sara Hensley — did not want to move forward. He said Beck had simply “sidestepped them” and pitched it to council members.
“I think, as leadership, if we’re saying we’re going to ignore staff recommendation, we should be willing to lead that way and say, ‘OK, I’ll do it and you upload it for me,’ versus ‘No, I disagree and I’m just not going to do it,’ or ‘No, I don’t want to use my time; I’m going to use staff time,’” Hudspeth told the council.
Council member Joe Holland disagreed and called staff adding a disclaimer to the data an excellent idea.
“I think reinstituting this would increase transparency and ease for people checking up on votes,” Holland said. “... I would support it and I’m not going to do it myself. I’m not going to go out and fix streets and direct traffic [either].”