WPCNR MEDIA-ATIONS. June 6, 2009: The independent White Plains information websites, www.whiteplainsonline.com and www.wpny.com, gathered, edited and created for the last five years by Don Hughes of White Plains will “go dark” by the end of next, Mr. Hughes announced today.
Don Hughes, right, the “Documentarian” with Eleanor McDonald at recent City Budget and Management Committee Meeting. Mr. Hughes announced he was not going to continue his unique information websites.
The sites were begin in 2004 by Mr. Hughes in an effort to get important facts, papers, and official documents to the White Plains community in a timely manner. Mr. Hughes said due to business concerns, he can no longer finance the sites and devote the time to gathering the extensive data needed to produce the site content.
Hughes said he began the site in an effort to bring more transparency to both the city government in power and the Democratic Party. For the last five years, he has done just that, attending work sessions, taping the sessions, and putting up audio clips of particularly interest, plus a host of other interesting documents.
Now that historical resource that Mr. Hughes has created will be gone in a week.
Mr. Hughes issued the following statement, chronicling why he is closing the sites. It also reveals a pattern of official attitudes towards transparency on the part of the city administration, the Common Council and the City Democratic Party.
Herewith, Mr. Hughes’ statement:
I can no longer afford to maintain the websites www.WhitePlainsOnLine.com, and www.WPNY.us, or the weekly schedule e-mail.
In early 2004 I was very concerned about the political polarization of our country. A fog of posturing and rhetoric, occasionally rent by lightning strikes of fear, had settled over the county. There was a climate of “my way or the highway”.
And, despite claims of wanting to work together, people with different views were dismissed as fools. Decisions were being made based on faith and intuition instead of facts. I also believed (and still do) that the overwhelming majority of people are not fools and will make reasonable decisions given reasonable information.
Knowing that I would have little impact on a national level, I offed to help the White Plains Democratic City Committee with technology issues and to add additional information to their website. There was no interest.
I then made phone calls and wrote letters for several national candidates and did research for several local candidates. After the election, I felt that a number of candidates (both Democratic and Republican) deserved better vote counts than they got. It seemed that many of the really important issues could not be adequately discussed in sound bytes, palm cards, or three minute answers at a candidate’s night forum.
Consider that in the intervening years a number of candidates attempted to discuss the potential for the financial problems now overwhelming our city, and that they were easily trivialized as being messengers of “doom and gloom”. If the subject had been honestly discussed, maybe we would not now be looking at a 6.5% tax increase.
And while I think that most of the people that have been elected to office are well meaning, I do not believe that they were always the best of the field, or whom a better informed electorate would have chosen.
Tried of talking and in an effort to get things going, I started a new website called www.WhitePlainsDemocrats.com and sent out the following request:
“Even though the election is over, it is still important that the issues that were raised are not brushed aside for another 2 years. Perhaps it is even more important now so that the administration does not forget that they represent all of the residents, not just the ones that voted for them.
“I am looking for ideas on what to include. Some thoughts: mailing list, database of letters to the city and when/if they were answered, current financial information, meetings calendar, speakers, meet ups…. Thoughts?”
The response was a demand to close the site because it might be confused with the the WPDCC’s site www.wpdems.com and viewers might think that it represented the official position of the WPDCC.
After some thought, I renamed the site www.WhitePlainsOnLine.com and expanded the audience to include all political parties including Democrats, Republicans, Working Families, Green, Conservative, Independence, Liberal, and Libertarian.
I offered free web pages to neighborhood associations and offered any local official the opportunity to reach out to area residents with newsletters, blogs, white papers, articles, or anything else that they though would help to keep the voters informed on the important issues. I contacted all of the Common Council members and pleaded with them to discuss the issues behind items appearing on the agenda. I promised to not censor the content.
There were no takers.
The project was taking more and more of my time, but I felt that it was critical, and with my wife’s consent, I quit my day job to devote full time to collecting and posting information.
As I became more involved, it became clear that by the time projects came up for votes at Common Council meetings that it was too late to have much impact on the outcome; that it was necessary to identify important projects early in the process as they were introduced in the various committees and boards.
I also discovered that almost none of the background material (explaining the rationals and specifics behind resolutions and projects on the Common Council agendas) was available on-line, and that researching any proposal meant many hours at the library.
I bought a scanner and OCR software and started scanning some material, and manually entering other information; and organizing it all in a searchable on-line index. I asked if I could get monitored access to historical agendas and minutes so that I could scan them.
The city refused. Fortunately someone with personal copies gave me access to several years of material. Many late nights were spent scanning documents. An equal amount of time was spent in creating programs for managing, searching, and displaying the resulting files.
Most requests to the city for data were returned indicating that they should be made as FOIL requests – which I did, and which resulted an interesting exchange with the Mayor at a subsequent Common Council meeting about burdening his staff with requests (which was strange since most of them are still unanswered)..
I postulated that perhaps one of the reasons that so few people attended the various hearings and meetings was the lack of an accurate calendar. I started an on-line calendar. I discovered that obtaining accurate information was difficult and required numerous weekly phone calls to various departments to verify times and locations. And since I was getting frequent e-mails asking when various items would be discussed, I started sending a weekly e-mail covering important meetings.
I reorganized the website into two parts: www.WhitePlainsOnLine.com with a searchable collection of agendas, and minutes, and www.WPNY.us with a collection of ordinances, maps, and other information. I spent a lot of time entering information from the city’s charter and code, building code, financial reports as text and excel files, and traffic ordinance. Some projects such as the interactive map of sex offenders required a lot of time navigating the maze of state bureaucracies to get approval and then a lot of tinkering to find some way to automate extracting the data.
I spent several days at the DEC office in New Paltz photocopying material (documenting the city’s long covered-up 30 year toleration of the contaminated city landfill) to add to the site.
I attended meetings and uploaded audio recordings to the site. I added maps of building code violations, and maps of election information including voting patterns. Accurately mapping voter registration information required purchasing several databases and a month of programming effort (sticking pins in a map is easy, doing it accurately with ambiguous data is hard).
I also asked about getting electronic copies of a number of city and county maps but was informed that they were not available. I purchased lager printed maps, paid to have them scanned and converted to .pdf files at a local blueprint shop, and loaded them on the site. I added write-ups on the membership and charters of various boards and commissions. I added RSS, SMS, voice-mail, and Twitter interfaces.
My hope was that there was some truth in the oft repeated claim of wanting to work together, and that the city and others would see this as an opportunity to take advantage of a considerable amount of expertise at no cost. I met several times with the city to offer to help on any technology projects that they did not have the resources to handle. I developed and demonstrated a problem reporting and contact management system. Perhaps I was suspected of having some hidden agenda because there was never any followup.
There also was never any response to my requests to serve on the Cable Access Commission, or the Pedestrian/Traffic Management Advisory Committee. To be fair, similar offers to the county were met with similar silence. The only groups to take advantage were the state DOT, which keeps me actively updated on local projects, and the White Plains School District which regularly supplies meeting information and supporting material. The Library Board, and the Beautification Foundation sporadically send meeting information.
The city’s website has been recently updated and some of the missing information such as the City Charter and Zoning Ordinance have been added, there is a form for reporting problems, and you can now pay some fees on-line. I hope that I had some part in pushing them into the 20th century.
Last year I wrote: “Being a District Leader is an important position. They are the elected positions closest to you and thus the start of the information pipeline to higher levels of government. Vote for someone from your neighborhood who shares your Democratic values, who takes the time to knock on your door to get your opinions, and who will still be interested in your concerns next year and the year after, and is not just trying to make a one-time point.”
Shortly thereafter a past committee chairman forcefully stated that the function of district leaders was to collect signatures, not to collect opinions. I was stunned. I increased my efforts in trying to find a way for people to express their concerns.
Late last year I was thrilled when the WPDCC reconstituted the Issues Committee. Unfortunately after meeting several times to generate a list of concerns that the WPDCC might want to discuss, and before any decisions were made on how to present the information, we were visited by two Common Council members who indicated that they did not want to be constrained by published position papers. The committee has not met since.
The last straw was several weeks ago when the Common Council effectively eliminated the job of Director of Information Services for the city and it became clear that the Common Council does not see technology as critical to making the city more efficient and cost effective, but as simply as a cost center that, like an electric bill, needs to be controlled. I am tired of hitting my head against the wall, my family is tired of forgoing purchases, and I am admitting defeat.
I would like to thank everyone who sent supportive notes, to John R. who made a donation, and to the neighborhood associations who paid for acquiring some of the material. I now need a real job, and would also appreciate any information about anyone looking for a Technology Director, and my wife would appreciate any information about EMT or Emergency Response coordination positions.
