Our View
Our View: The Record Is the Record
A clerk found her own mistake, told everybody the same afternoon, and a board decided to live with the result. We think two of those three things were plainly right.
Donna Skoglund made a mistake two weeks ago. She found it herself, on her own time, proofreading her own minutes against a recording nobody was going to ask her about. She reported it the same afternoon to the chairman, the developer and this newspaper, in that order, and she did not shade it and she did not spread it around. That is not a small thing and it should be said first and plainly.
The board then had to decide what to do, and voted 4–1 to let the adopted language stand. We understand the vote. We are not entirely comfortable with it.
Curt Ellefson, in dissent, said the problem is not the number but the method: the board found an error in its own record and kept it because it liked the result. He is right that this is what happened. A body that corrects its record only when the correction is inconvenient to somebody else is not keeping a record. It is keeping a preference.
Against that stands Sherry Niskanen’s answer, which is also right. She voted against eighteen. Being asked now to vote to restore two lots so that the paperwork can be tidy is a strange use of a person’s convictions, and she declined, and we would have declined too.
And there is the plainest fact of all: five people voted on language they heard read aloud in a public meeting. That is what a roll call is. It is not a formality that happens after the decision; it is the decision. If we say otherwise now because a pen slipped, we are saying that the real motion is whatever a board member meant, which no citizen can read and no clerk can file.
So here is what we would ask. The council takes this up October 6 with a recommendation that says sixteen, and the council should say out loud, in the meeting, that it knows how the number got there. Not to embarrass anybody — the clerk has already embarrassed herself more thoroughly and more honorably than anyone else could have. Because a number that arrived by accident and was kept on purpose ought to be adopted with its history attached, and because in ten years somebody will read these minutes and deserve to know which it was.