As of this week, I've been added back to the Mehlville Fire District's media notification list. You should now be able to get timely information about your fire district's business.
Mehlville Fire Protection District Agenda
Directors' Meeting November 18, 2008
MFPD Conference Room
11020 Mueller Road
CALL REGULAR MEETING TO ORDER AT 7:00 P.M.
PAYMENT OF BILLS OF OCTOBER 27, 2008
OLD BUSINESS
Seniority/Vacancy Bidding Process
NEW BUSINESS
AED Program
PUBLIC COMMENTS
BOARD VOTE ON CLOSED SESSION
OPEN SESSION ADJOURNMENT
CLOSED SESSION IMMEDIATELY FOLLOWING OPEN SESSION
Personnel
Legal
CLOSED SESSION ADJOURNMENT
(Individuals wishing to make comments should fill out a Speaker's Card and turn it in to the Chairman before the meeting. )
The District's Training Facility and Conference Room are handicapped accessible. If you need any special accommodations, please contact 314.894.0420, extension 1713 between 8:00 a.m. and 4:00 p.m. Monday through Friday.
Posted 11/14/2008 @ 1600
1 comment:
Paste and Copy workd so good for Stoney and Hilmer, Er-I mean the 'Truthspot' I thought this fits in because its there political hero in Jeff City!---
Gov. Matt Blunt's office misled public on e-mails
By Tony Messenger, Jo Mannies, Jake Wagman and Virginia Young
ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH
11/16/2008
For more than a year, Missouri Gov. Matt Blunt's administration has defended itself against accusations that it has ignored laws that guarantee an open government.
The administration contended that a fired staff lawyer never offered advice about the governor's policy requiring public records, including e-mails, to be retained.
But he did.
Blunt's staffers said the administration did not regularly conduct state business out of public view on campaign e-mail accounts.
But they did.
And the governor's then-chief of staff denied the existence of e-mails showing he had engaged in political activities on state time.
But hundreds of them exist.
Proof of that pattern of misstatements is contained in more than 60,000 pages of e-mails, filling 22 boxes, that were turned over late last week to three news outlets, including the Post-Dispatch, which participated in a lawsuit seeking the records.
Most of the e-mails spanned about three months in 2007, from August to October, when Blunt and his staff were buffeted with questions about how the office treated e-mails. Media outlets sought the records to determine whether the governor's office was violating state laws that require the state's business to be done in public.
Blunt's office stymied the attempts, in some cases claiming the records didn't exist, and in other cases, seeking to charge tens of thousands of dollars for them.
The newly released e-mails portray a staff caught off guard by news outlets' queries and unable to determine whether the governor's office even had a policy on public record retention.
FIRED STAFFER OBJECTED
When Blunt and his staff were telling reporters last year that e-mails weren't public records and didn't have to be retained, then-deputy counsel Scott Eckersley objected. His complaints were rebuffed.
"Henry, can you, in a very kind way, ask Scott to not send me e-mails about e-mail retention," asked Blunt spokesman Rich Chrismer in a Sept. 19 e-mail to Eckersley's boss, Henry Herschel.
Earlier that day, Eckersley had sent a note to Chief of Staff Ed Martin making sure he was aware that the governor's office had an official records retention policy, contradicting a statement Blunt had made to the Post-Dispatch that morning.
Martin told Eckersley to send the note to Chrismer.
But it wasn't the first time Eckersley had brought the subject up. A few days earlier, on Sept. 15, Eckersley had sent Martin what he called a "boiled-down version" of a memo he and had Herschel worked on together. The memo made it clear that e-mails, just as other government documents, can be public records subject to retention.
The records clearly contradict statements from Blunt and other staffers over the past year denying that Eckersley ever discussed the Sunshine Law or e-mail retention with his bosses.
Even on the day the deputy counsel was fired, Sept. 28, his boss asked another staffer to send him a copy of the Sunshine Law memo Eckersley had produced on Sept. 14, according to an e-mail.
"It's about as significant as you get. ... Scott gave the advice they claimed he never gave," said Jeff Bauer, Eckersley's attorney, on Friday when told about the recently released records. "That's exactly what we expected.''
Blunt spokeswoman Jessica Robinson now says that Eckersley's advice was improper.
"The e-mails that he sent were an unsolicited effort to provide communication strategy," she said. Eckersley "was not being truthful to supervisors as to whom the e-mail was distributed."
Eckersley contends he was fired because of his persistent complaints about potential violations of open records laws. Blunt has asserted that Eckersley was fired for doing work on state time for his father's health care business, for tardiness and for insubordination.
Since being fired, Eckersley, 31, has filed a wrongful termination and defamation lawsuit against the governor and his staff members. The suit claims that Martin told staff members "to make sure they deleted their e-mail in both the inbox and trash files to ensure they did not have to be turned over to the press or public."
The e-mail records portray Eckersley as a loyal but sometimes tardy Republican foot soldier who wasn't afraid to join in verbal attacks against Blunt's key political rival, Attorney General Jay Nixon. Eckersley had exchanged e-mails with the Republican presidential campaign of Mitt Romney, whom Blunt was backing.
Some of Eckersley's e-mails discussed personal business dealings and a failed romance.
Robinson said Friday that such e-mails "demonstrate one of the reasons that he was dismissed," because so many were personal in nature.
But dozens of the released e-mails written by Herschel and Martin also were personal. Martin and Herschel discussed personal finances with their wives and received dirty jokes from others, for example.
Robinson declined to comment when asked about them.
SUNSHINE REQUESTS DENIED
A string of e-mails from Sept. 4, 2007, spells out the beginning of the Blunt administration's runaround with reporters seeking information. After the administration told the Springfield News-Leader that Martin retained no e-mails concerning his attempts to rally anti-abortion groups to bad-mouth Nixon, the News-Leader produced one such e-mail.
"It sure looks like an e-mail from me," Martin wrote that day, before justifying his use of government resources for what amounted to a political campaign.
When pressed the same day about the existence of such e-mails, Blunt spokesman Rich Chrismer denied any ever existed.
"None of Ed's e-mails on this topic are or were available anywhere," he wrote.
On Thursday, the state produced dozens of such e-mails. Martin wrote Catholic bishops asking for their help. He wrote anti-abortion advocates pleading with them to attack the attorney general.
Nixon — now the governor-elect — launched an investigation last fall into whether Blunt's office had broken any laws by deleting e-mail. Whistle-blowers in the Office of Administration had told Nixon's office that Blunt staffers tried to order that backup tapes be scheduled for destruction.
Blunt's staff told investigators appointed by Nixon's office that it would cost more than $500,000 to produce documents they were seeking.
Those investigators filed suit, and the Post-Dispatch, The Kansas City Star and The Associated Press intervened in the legal action, to protect and obtain the documents they sought.
The e-mails that were produced Thursday show Blunt was largely silent in many of the conversations with staff members, serving mostly as proofreader-in-chief, offering minor edits to speeches and letters.
When Blunt did participate in e-mail discussions, he usually used a handheld BlackBerry device purchased by his campaign. Nearly all of Blunt's e-mails came from his campaign-funded MattBlunt.com account.
Martin, too, used a campaign BlackBerry for much of his correspondence, though he used both his state and campaign e-mail accounts.
Asked on Saturday whether Blunt approved of Martin's prolific communication with partisan groups on state time, Robinson said: "The governor does not and cannot possibly monitor every e-mail that is sent from the office."
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