Uneducated Decisions

We were reading an article in the Osceola News-Gazette about the change in format to the county commission meetings, or (if we can borrow from another blog) their addition of practice meetings, when something odd struck us. The very first sentence of the article reads "Osceola County Commission meetings will switch to a new format beginning in October, after county officials decided the new schedule would allow for more educated policy-making decisions." This would seem to mean that the commissioners feel that they have been making uneducated policy-making decisions before this format change. The WayneWho staff would have to agree.

The new meeting schedule is to give commissioners a chance to ask county staff questions and request more details before making final decisions, which is what we thought the regular meetings were for. All the commissions before the current sitting commission seemed to be able to ask questions at the real meeting, but, from the 'junk drawer' look of the county, they were probably making uneducated policy decisions as well. We are not sure why the commissioners are afraid to ask staff questions at a regularly scheduled and televised meetings, but we are sure they have some sort of excuse. For now all we know is that the old format made it so the commissioners were not asking all the questions of staff that they should have been, which explains the whole budget fiasco and why so many lost their jobs.

If nothing else, we hope that the new practice meetings improve the quality of decisions our commission will make in the future. Heck, the WayneWho staff even discussed putting up practice articles the day before we were going to post an article so could make sure it looked good first. This would give our readers a chance to lobby on whether they liked an article or not. If our readers didn't like a post and we saw that it was not going to be popular, we could just not post the real article and everyone would be happy. We might just have to try it sometime.