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STONE HARBOR – Borough Council experienced little difficulty as it moved its governing body meetings to Zoom, in response to COVID-19.
Putting a toe in the water, the council’s first virtual meeting was short, with its customary work session abandoned and the regular meeting agenda kept to essential business only. The meeting went off without any difficulty.
Emboldened, the council added back its work session discussion format. Public participation picked up and attendance, judged by the electronic voice that announces the participants in the meeting, was higher at times than it normally would be at an in-person meeting. The technology allowed the effective sharing of presentation slides.
The May 5 meeting didn’t go as smoothly. Hacking into Zoom meetings for little apparent gain has become a COVID-19 isolation-era sport. On that day, Stone Harbor was the unwelcome recipient of a hack, inserting what Mayor Judith Davies-Dunhour termed, “a lot of profanity and racial slurs” into a necessary borough meeting dealing with an important bond issue.
The rules concerning bond ordinances require certain advertising and notification periods that were put in place to ensure voter awareness of government actions. Calling off the meeting and rescheduling the vote for another day would have set in motion a series of required actions that in turn would delay consideration of the ordinances. The rules also do not allow the governing body to proceed without public access to the meeting.
The result was a 45 minute delay, during which time new access parameters were put in place that allowed the borough to individually admit participants it could verify.
That these meetings held by municipalities across the county go as well as they do is testimony to the hard work of municipal staff who have had to incorporate conferencing technology into a rule-based process of public governance without warning or advanced planning. Now, new vulnerabilities need to be considered and planned for.
