BY GRANT HARDING
Los Alamos

Los Alamos County Council recently removed transparency from their strategic goals and replaced it with “outreach.” They did this following intense public pressure to remove transparency as a strategic goal in light of Council’s track record of paying little more than lip service to sunshine. Essentially, Council was pressured to align its goals with its real-life behavior having disregarded numerous opportunities for improvement and chances to rebuild public trust.

In a rare instance, did Council bend to valid, sound arguments and pressure from the public? If so, one might think it’s telling they’d choose this public request to be reactive to.

For anyone who might think that they removed transparency as a strategic goal having made substantive changes to achieve it, or having done meaningful outreach, Tuesday night’s Council meeting was a grab bag of surprises – not so much to those who’ve been paying attention.

View/listen for yourself here:
http://losalamos.granicus.com/MediaPlayer.php?view_id=2&clip_id=2933

Of particular interest are the items exposed under public comment by the Los Alamos Reporter’s Maire O’Neill starting at about 1:54.

Also very interesting are the County’s statements concerning vendors at the summer concerts, followed by Cortni Nucklos’ (Sirphey) eloquent response starting at about 1:11 and 1:50 respectively.

There’s more, but the status quo is in full effect; the lack of transparency under this Council continues.