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Berkeley government agencies scored far above other government agencies in the area, according to a Berkeley Daily Planet review of online accessibility to local government meeting information. 

Of six local city and education agencies reviewed by the Planet, the Berkeley City Council had the top score of 40 points, with the Berkeley Unified School District coming in second with 35. The Board of Trustees of the Peralta Community College District came in last with minus 10 points. 

The Daily Planet assigned five points a piece for such items as having agendas and supporting documents online, giving extra points for extra amenities. The Planet also took away points for misleading or confusing online information. 

The government entities reviewed were the City of Richmond, the Peralta Community College District, the Berkeley Unified School District, the City of Oakland, the City of Berkeley, and the Oakland Unified School District. 

Sara Cox, Berkeley City Clerk, said she was not surprised by the city’s high rating. 

“We’ve worked long and hard to make information available online for our citizens,” she said. “We try to make as much available as soon as possible.” 

Mark Coplan, Public Information Officer for the Berkeley Unified School District, agreed. “That’s been a real focus of the district,” he said. “It’s something that’s demanded by our community. We’re in a community who don’t just want to know what’s on the agenda, they want to be able to see the specific documents in advance of the meeting.” 

Both the City of Berkeley and BUSD provide a calendar for meetings scheduled for the year, agendas and minutes with links to online PDF documents of the backup material for each agenda item, with online access for the information going back to the summer of 2002. 

Berkeley Unified got extra credit for having the easiest accessibility, including a link on its homepage to the “Next School Board Meeting,” including the meeting date, agenda in both Microsoft Word and Adobe PDF, and a complete backup packet. The City of Berkeley got extra credit for being one of the few city governments in the country to include online access to stored videos of past City Council meetings. 

Cox called the meeting videos “invaluable. They are worth their weight in gold for research.” 

She said the only extra work entailed in posting the videos is having a staff person to provide indexing, so that citizens can go directly to the portion of the meeting they want to view. 

Both Cox and Coplan said online production of meeting documents was saving their respective agencies money, with both the city and the school district having to print fewer documents to be made available for meetings. 

“It saves a lot of money in paper cost, as well as staff time putting together the agenda packets,” Cox said. “Eliminating the physical job of assembling the packets eliminated a good deal of drudgery.” 

Coplan estimated that online posting of documents had saved BUSD “thousands of dollars a year. We used to print a few hundred copies of backup documents for each board meeting, and we sometimes had to print up to 500 copies for items that were of particular community interest. Now we normally print less than 50.” 

And Cox added that the storage costs for the documents, even for the meeting videos, is “not that costly. The price of online storage has gone down tremendously, from year to year.” 

Cox said that Berkeley is working on establishing an online legislative history, which should be available within the next year. The legislative history provides information on when a city ordinance was introduced, the original text, any amendments, and any votes taken. The City of Oakland currently is the only local agency covered by the Daily Planet that supplies such a legislative history, but does so through an outside company called Legistar. Cox said that Berkeley considered Legistar, but eventually decided on purchasing an alternate program “which will bend more to the city’s way of doing business, and is more forgiving of the public trying to do online research.” 

Following are the scores for the six government agencies surveyed by the Daily Planet. 

City of Berkeley: 40 points 

Provides an online meeting schedule, meeting agendas, minutes, links to online meeting documents, and a meeting history going back several years (5 points apiece). Extra points for online meeting videos (10 points) as well as an online calendar that provides links to past and future meetings, agendas, meeting summaries, and videos. 

Berkeley Unified School District: 35 points 

Provides an online meeting schedule, meeting agendas, minutes, links to online meeting documents, and a meeting history going back several years (5 points apiece). Extra points given for the “Next School Board Meeting” information link on the district’s homepage and the most user-friendly list of past meetings in chronological order, including accompanying agendas, packets, and minutes links. 

City of Oakland: 25 points 

Provides an online meeting schedule, meeting agendas, minutes, links to online meeting documents, and a meeting history going back several years (5 points apiece). Using Legistar, the City of Oakland provides the basic minimum package for online government meeting access. 

Oakland Unified School District: 15 points 

Provides an online meeting schedule, meeting agendas, minutes, links to online meeting documents, and a meeting history going back several years (5 points apiece). While online meeting documents are easily accessible for 2006, past documents are stored under a format called webXtender, under which they are so difficult to access on both a PC and a Mac that some users may eventually give up. 10 points was subtracted for lack of past document accessibility. 

City of Richmond: 15 points 

Agendas, minutes, and meeting history online (5 points apiece). No online documents or meeting schedule available. 

Peralta Community College District:  

10 points 

The only agency surveyed with a negative rating. The district provides a calendar only for January 2006, with no meeting dates or other information posted. No agendas, minutes, online documents, or meeting history is available online. The district does provide online links to agendas and minutes for various board committees. However, these lists are completely useless as they are kept in no chronological order whatsoever, with minutes and agendas for the same meeting appearing at random and in separate places on the list. Five points were taken away for a complete lack of organization for the committee meeting list. No similar list for the full Board of Trustees meetings themselves was readily apparent, so another 5 points was subtracted for having links to board committee meeting information but not full board information.