Playing Games with CDD Meeting Minutes
Geo
are really only two possibilities to explain what they have done this time:
1) Either Gary Moyer did not review the November 2010
Harmony CDD meeting minutes file prior to its
publication;
2) or Gary Moyer intentionally published digitized
meeting minutes contrary to the long-term interests
of Harmony residents.
See the attached CDD meeting minutes files. The first attachment is from
October 2010. The second attachment is from November 2010. Can you see the
difference?
The first PDF file is searchable and copiable as plain text. The second is
not. The November minutes were "digitized". This means that Gary or one of
his assistants first printed out the minutes on paper from the original
electronic meeting minutes file (MS Word format I believe), then they ran
the paper through a digital scanner (like a fax machine) to produce the
resulting PDF file. In this case they used a Canon iR7105 scanner. You can
see this by viewing the PDF properties of the file. You can also see that,
unlike the October 2010 file, the subject of the November 2010 file is
"Image".
Other nearby public entities, like the city of Melbourne for example, use
text based PDF meeting minutes files (see the 3rd attachment below). The
Osceola County Commission even makes available minutes in multiple formats,
including MS Word formatted text and PDF image files. The image files are
only necessary if you need to see the signed meeting minutes. The text
versions are made available without signatures. You will notice that none of
the Harmony CDD minutes PDF files have signatures, including the November
2010 meeting minutes scanned from paper.
The implications of this change are that anyone wishing to research the
Harmony CDD years from now will have a much greater difficulty doing so. For
example, if you wanted to quickly count the number of motions made during
the October 2010 meeting you can do so in less than 10 seconds by typing
"motion" (without quotes) in the PDF search space and pressing ENTER. The
same thing can't be done with the November 2010 meeting minutes. It would
take a few minutes (at least) to do the same thing. This would be at least a
10 fold increase in time spent to read through the minutes yourself to make
a similar determination. Do this for several other inquiries and you can
easily waste many unnecessary hours. Needless to say this would be a serious
disincentive for some folks who may wish to investigate what has really been
going on here in the future.
Here are examples of Gary Moyer's past attempts to make the Harmony CDD
meeting minutes much harder to use.
"Why You Should Attend CDD Meetings" (see http://tinyurl.com/2dmwlfe ):
Speaking of meeting minutes, I wonder why they are
published in their least usable form. What do I mean?
Harmony CDD minutes are published as pictures rather
than text. This means that they are not searchable and
excerpts can't be easily extracted.
"CDD Meeting 4/30/2009" (see http://tinyurl.com/2bhdjbe ):
I also pointedly asked Brenda another question. Why
have meeting minutes been uploaded to the Harmony CDD
website as pictures rather than as text? (unlike normal
organizations that post meeting minutes as text). As
most people know, text is easily quotable and
searchable, while text can neither be copied from nor
found in a picture.
"Questioning the Developer" (see http://tinyurl.com/327fk63 ):
BTW, when it was pointed out at the same meeting that
the management company switched from posting meeting
minutes as text to posting meeting minutes as pictures
of text (ie. minutes that could not be searched or
copied from): "Mr. Evans stated we are good with what
we have." This is just one of many examples
demonstrating that Bob Evans appears to be a luddite
when it comes to information technology. This is
another indication that he is really not fit to chair a
board that makes decisions about how a community
manages information in the 21st century.
Bob Evans has a well known penchant for secrecy. He also is no advocate of
transparency (just the opposite has been demonstrated repeatedly in the
past). So it looks like Gary Moyer is once again trying to make it as
difficult as possible for the public at large to research the goings on in
Harmony. Why now all of the sudden? Perhaps because he knows that with the
reinstallation of Bob Evans as the illegitimate chairman of the Harmony CDD
he can get away with it.
The first possibility above implies that Gary Moyer is incompetent and that
$50,000+ a year is not quite enough money for him to properly review meeting
minutes prior to their publication. The second implies that he is doing the
bidding of Bob Evans with impunity. I seriously doubt that the former is the
case since Gary has been doing this CDD stuff for so long that he certainly
knows what he is doing.
Since this issue was written about previously, the Harmony CDD meeting
minutes were republished online in the proper text searchable format. Let's
see what happens this time.
Geo
valuable historical data is being destroyed on an ongoing basis by Gary
Moyer and his company. I apologize for this.
Previously I detailed how Gary Moyer has falsified Harmony meeting minutes
in the recent past (see "Harmony Revisionism", http://tinyurl.com/29pu945 ).
Then I followed that with how Gary Moyer destroys the audio recordings of
Harmony CDD meetings after only 2 years - thereby removing evidence of his
tampering with the historical record - even though it costs only pennies to
keep them (see http://tinyurl.com/2w9dx6h ). We may have something similar
going on in the case of digitized minutes.
Since Gary has made his digitized version of the CDD meeting minutes
available online, I suspect that he will claim that it is perfectly
legitimate for him to destroy the original text based electronic documents
like he does with the original audio recordings of CDD meetings.
It will be pretty sad if the CDD supervisors recently elected to protect the
long-term interests of Harmony residents allow this to happen, like Bob
Evans and his buddies have been allowing the destruction of CDD audio
recordings for all these years.
Geo
directly for the November 2010 meeting minutes. That was 2 days ago. What do
you think I received? I received a version of the meeting minutes that is
indeed a textual PDF file (ie. searchable and text copiable)!
Well lo and behold, Gary's digitized version of the meeting minutes has now
been silently replaced with the same minutes file I received from Severn
Trent (see http://tinyurl.com/2g3n6hs ).
Thanks Gary. Naturally, I don't expect a response from you, but it surely
would be significant gesture on your part to acknowledge the mistake and
assure us that our historical public records will not be damaged this way
again.
sainted
After reading the actual minutes, I must admit my frustration of the comments made by alleged professionals. Their conversations are more in line with school children in the elementary grades. No wonder why so many residents are not happy with their officers and management. Common sense has been eliminated.
--- On Wed, 1/5/11, Geo <IIDIMG...@spammotel.com> wrote: