Opinion: Johnson County government isn't 'public' without better transcripts of meetings
In recent weeks, a curious tendency seems to have emerged in Johnson County government — a reluctance by the Board of Supervisors to provide accessible transcripts of public meetings.
The argument in favor of doing so supposes that, given the variety of salient topics being discussed by the board — distribution of funds from the American Rescue Plan, what to do with the county’s military surplus armored vehicle — the processes of local government should be made accessible to all people, including those without the ability to attend or listen to public meetings in their original format. As the entire American project is based around the notion that our governments answer to the people, and that definition of “the people” is broadly representative of the entire populace, this reasoning checks out to me.
It should be noted that some accommodations are already offered by Johnson County. The county notes that closed-captioning services are available on meeting recordings and that transcription services are available via Zoom on request. But this requirement for a request to be made is simply another barrier that turns people away from engaging with their local government.
This is really part of a larger issue of the inaccessibility of public meetings, ranging from their multi-hour run time, obtuse agenda packets that are several hundred pages long, and opaquely posted schedules that can only be found via a deeply targeted web search. In practice, the sum of these barriers means that the attendees of public meetings are frequently not representative of the general population, selecting against the young, the poor, the transient, the nonwhite, and those who do not own land.
Zachary Oren Smith, now at Iowa Public Radio, wrote about this issue at length in his People’s Bureau newsletter, describing this tendency as a “hostile architecture” that ultimately denies most people access to their local government, even if they care about the place they live.
The benefits of increased accessibility are not conferred only to those with disabilities. For example, the mandatory implementation of curb cuts at sidewalk intersections from 1990 onwards as a result of the Americans with Disabilities Act benefited not just those on wheelchairs, but also people pulling carts, pushing strollers, or those simply prone to stubbing their toes on the curb.
Similarly, openly available transcripts of county meetings would be a benefit for the whole population — it is much easier to find specific information one is looking for by searching keywords on a text transcript as opposed to clicking through several hours of video; simply the thought of doing so has turned me off from ever re-watching the multitude of city council meetings I have actually attended. Indeed, this phenomenon of accessible features benefiting a larger population than initially intended has its own name, based upon the first example — the curb cut effect.
When this issue was first presented to me, I was initially concerned that by the time I would be able to write about it the topic would become outdated; however, it appears such concerns were optimistic. Local government processes in Johnson County moving sluggishly are not an unfamiliar tendency to me, but just because it is familiar does not mean it should be accepted for the sake of maintaining the status quo.
It appears there has been correspondence on the issue going back to at least August with little in the way of change or progress, which I find puzzling given the relative ease with which this issue could be handled. Software such as Otter is now quite good at creating live transcriptions while identifying distinct speakers, and in my experience requires little correction to be presentable to a public audience.
Unlike prior articles of mine, this is not a call for a “return to tradition.” Disability rights have generally been overlooked for most of U.S. history, and only in recent decades have begun to receive a degree of attention more proportionate to their actual social need.
However, there is perhaps one example Johnson County could follow, and a local one at that — Tom Harkin. The last Democratic U.S. senator from Iowa, he was the author of the Americans with Disabilities Act and afterward a staunch advocate against reductions in the scope of the act resultant from Supreme Court rulings.
Iowa’s Democrats should be proud of Harkins’ legacy, and should see Johnson County’s status as a de facto single-party state under the tutelage of the Democratic Party as an opportunity to implement policies aligned with this legacy relatively unheeded. Making an effort to compile easily accessible transcripts of public meetings would be a good place to start.
Austin Wu grew up in Cedar Rapids and is a recent graduate from the University of Iowa College of Public Health. In his spare time he has taken interest in local history and urban design, and through this column seeks to imagine a better tangible future in eastern Iowa by taking inspiration from principles of the past. It will appear in the Press-Citizen twice monthly. Follow him on Twitter, @theaustinwu.
This article originally appeared on Iowa City Press-Citizen: Opinion: Johnson County needs better transcripts of 'public' meetings
