THOUSAND OAKS : Dispute Erupts Over Minutes of Meetings

Tensions between Thousand Oaks’ feuding politicians and top city officials have flared up again, in a dispute over how council meetings should be recorded for posterity.

During a heated debate late Tuesday night, Mayor Elois Zeanah and Councilwoman Jaime Zukowski argued that the city clerk should include brief summaries of the reasons behind each vote, instead of merely reporting the action taken.

But council members Judy Lazar and Frank Schillo denounced that proposal as a waste of time, insisting that the minutes should be concise records of policy decisions. Anybody interested in tracking the debate, they said, could use other sources. The city keeps audio tapes of council meetings for a decade and stores videotapes for several months.

In the middle of the argument was City Clerk Nancy Dillon, who has worked in that post for a dozen years.

Because of an ongoing fight about the record of a Feb. 1 meeting, the council has not approved any minutes in more than two months, she said.

Dillon acknowledged that the minutes have fluctuated over the past several months, sometimes listing the reasons for each vote and sometimes simply recording the final tally. She said the different approaches reflect the writing styles of the three employees who take turns preparing the minutes.

In a memo distributed to the council, Dillon asked that the city clerk “not be placed in the difficult position of selectively including or omitting council member comments, or subjectively interpreting” the debate.

Politics aside, she noted that preparing condensed minutes takes 15 hours of uninterrupted staff time. Typing up a verbatim transcript could nearly double that workload, Dillon said.

As the Tuesday night meeting stretched toward midnight, the council members agreed to leave control of the minutes in Dillon’s hands. She said she would review the contested record of Feb. 1, but otherwise would continue to submit minutes that could vary depending on the writer.