Cornwall agendas and minutes restored, expanded

A paper copy of this month's council agenda on Monday, Dec. 10, 2018. The City of Cornwall has restored and even expanded its council agendas and minutes section -- a public record of all the city council business. (Newswatch Group/Bill Kingston)

CORNWALL – The public record of all the City of Cornwall’s council business has been restored and even expanded.

“I understand the concern and I’m going to be speaking to administration. My view is, the more information that’s available to the public, the better it is,” Bernadette Clement said last week in an interview with Cornwall Newswatch.

Clement was responding to a story Cornwall Newswatch first told you about where nine year’s worth of council agendas and minutes were omitted during the city’s transition to a new website. The website scrub was seen by some as a setback on city transparency.

As of this afternoon (Monday), all the agendas and minutes have been restored. The electronic records have even been expanded back to 1984. The previous version of the website only had agendas and minutes back to 2008.

Coun. Justin Towndale had planned to bring a motion to council at a future meeting, but now it appears that won’t need to happen. Towndale was surprised by the omission from the city’s website. “We were informed there wouldn’t be any loss of any sort of service. To me, that is a loss of service,” he told CNW.