Another observation from Wednesday’s Town Council meeting: we really don’t have adequate resources in place to properly track the movements and activities of Town Council members.
There was hardly an agenda item where Council member Lisa DiBello didn’t cite some anonymous source who reported to her on some other Council member’s suspicious activity. Council member Gregg Avedisian countered that he had his sources, too, who ratted Lisa out to him. And Council President Tom Gentz had a couple of reports he wanted to air out, too.
Council members Marge Frank and Dan Slattery apparently don't have such resources available to them, or at least they didn’t mention that they did.
But it was clear to me that surveillance resources are unevenly – perhaps unfairly – distributed among the Council members.
There should be a town ordinance that specifies how many spies and anonymous informants are assigned to each Council member, as well as how frequently Council members should receive reports on their colleagues. Of course, there is the important question of whether spies and informants should be volunteers or whether they should be town employees (or, as seems to be the case now, both). Then there's the larger question of whether surveillance should be expanded to cover other people in town, besides Town Council members.
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| Tracking chip for implant |
If this proves to be an expensive personnel budget item, the town could reduce the cost by enacting a labor-saving ordinance that requires each Council member to have subcutaneous implants – a GPS tracker, now commonly available from veterinarians, and a recorder/transmitter to pick up conversations. I think the implanted recording device is important because you want an accurate record of Council member’s conversations – and not every Council member is comfortable wearing a wire tap.
Author: Will Collette