Township Board Discusses Social Media, Approves Public Safety Millage Meeting

The West Bloomfield Township Twitter account has posted 120 tweets to 291 followers and its Facebook page has 309 fans.

How do those followers and fans know that what they are getting is representative of the township’s governing bodies as a whole? The board debated that subject at its meeting in Monday, with a clear division amongst board members obvious as to what the township’s web presence should entail on a whole.

Currently, the township’s website offers links to its official Facebook and Twitter pages, while departments including the Clerk and Community Development operate their own social media presence through the township’s information technology department, which reports to Supervisor Michele Economou Ureste.

A committee led by Treasurer Teri Weingarden and Clerk Catherine Shaughnessy offered a resolution to officiate township policy regarding those media presences, which included that Weingarden, Shaughnessy, and Ureste and “authorized employees” could make requests to the IT department to post information online as it complied with the policy.

Trustee Howard Rosenberg had offered a “friendly amendment” that Shaughnessy should review all content as the township’s keeper of records before the IT department would post it. Ureste seemed to take the suggestion as a political attack, as if a government official had made a request to the IT department that wasn’t in compliance with the policy.

“Who is the keeper of the policy?” Shaughnessy said. “Whoever it is that makes a request to the IT department, it has to comply with the policy.”

“If we didn’t want to make it political, I think we could take that (amendment) out,” Ureste said.

Weingarden insisted that the resolution was not intended as political strategy and offered to take it back to the committee for reworking, which was agreed upon by the board.

However, other board members took issue with the township’s current web presence on social media networking sites, which appears to have began on Twitter in June 2009. Trustee Larry Brown offered the link to the township’s Facebook page should be removed from the official website due to the possibility of online public comments going un-moderated.

“We’re linking the township website to websites that can be subject to any kind of conversations that can take place,” Brown said. “I’m comfortable with the fact that we have these sites but I don’t want to make that link.”

Brown also took issue as an “authorized employee” besides the Supervisor, Clerk, and Treasurer would have to be approved by the township board prior to beginning their own site. “I might want to post something, but I don’t want to jump through 16 hoops to get there,” he said.

Trustee Steve Kaplan said that he disagreed with the idea of a social media presence all together. “I’m uncomfortable with an employee making decisions on behalf of the board. I don’t need to have a Facebook and I don’t think we should have Facebooks connected to the township,” he said.

Other highlights from the board meeting included:

• The township board unanimously agreed upon the date of June 27 to discuss ballot language regarding a public safety millage renewal of its current rate of 3.14 mills which expires with the 2011 levy for the 2012 budget. The deadline for submitting language to Oakland County prior to the Nov. 8 election is Aug. 30.