No, not us, our blog is free and entirely volunteer. As this Mullett Township blog continues to print archived Minutes of the Regular and Special Meetings of The Mullett Township Board of Trustees it is clear that the Mullett Township Clerk, Ms Rachel Osborn, tasked by law to transcribe the Meeting minutes regularly redacts some information while promoting and embellishing her own agenda.
Minutes of a meeting are defined as a record or transcript of a meeting and by definition and law should be accurate, unbiased and truthful.
Mullett Township Clerk Rachel Osborn has openly promoted a number of agenda items of personal interest to her and we endorse some of her activity, but not her methods.
The Mullett Township Board has been, and unfortunately still is largely ignorant of the promotional opportunities a presence on the web could provide the township.
At the June regular meeting, quoting from Ms Osborn’s minutes, “Paul Chapoton gave a presentation of the new website for Mullett Township which he and his wife: Debbie Chapoton have been working on for several months. The website was well received and the board will be considering the adoption of same at the July 5th regular meeting. The website address is as follows: www.mullettgov-clerk.blogspot.com. A big thank you to the Chapotons for their work.”
These two “volunteers” did a presentation to the Board at the June regular meeting of a “website”, Mullett Township Government showing saved web pages of a “blog” hosted by Google. This volunteer effort was unsolicited by the Board, entirely new business, and Township Clerk Rachel Osborn lobbied the Board for an immediate adoption of the blog. The “volunteers”, evidently not understanding the meaning of volunteer, asked at that time only to be paid for 12 or 15 hours for their time developing the blog.
At the July regular meeting, quoting from the Ms Osborn’s minutes, “Rachel Osborn made a motion to pay the Chapotons $1,000.00 for their work to put together the new website for Mullett Township which will now be known as mullettgov-clerk.org, seconded by Dennis Dombroski, motion passed.”
This is not a website, it is simply a blog. Sorry, the Chapoton’s website is also simply a blog. The “volunteers” had only asked to be paid for 12 or 15 hours of their time. Ms Osborn and the entire Mullett Township Board again demonstrated their largesse with the Mullett Township taxpayers’ money by paying the “volunteers” either $83 per hour for 12 hours or $66 per hour for 15 hours work to design a blog page. Pretty good pay for an amateur job.
The “volunteers” in an apparent effort to hide the fact it is a simple, free blog available to anyone, changed a valid web address, www.mullettgov-clerk.blogspot.com and states the “website” is “mullettgov-clerk.org”. The blog also contains multiple commercial links that a government sponsored blog page should avoid as it appears to endorse some businesses while ignoring others.
Anyone, including the Mullett Township Board can register an unclaimed domain name, eg: “Mullett Township.org” for about $10 a year. The .org suffix is generally reserved for government entities or non-profits. Anyone, including the Mullett Township Board can then have an actual web page hosted with that domain name for a very nominal amount. Many of these webhosts have software designed for a layperson that is as simple to use as the Google blog the paid “volunteers” used.
Unfortunately, the Mullett Township Board has again acted in haste without educating themselves as to available options for a viable presence on the web. People do not look for Mullett Township on the web by entering “mullettgov-clerk.org”; they will use “Google”, “Yahoo search’, or “bing” to find Mullett Township. Good luck with that.
Blogging has been around for more than ten years. The Mullett Township Board has not yet discovered Facebook or Twitter. Let your twelve year old computer literate children know that the Mullett Township Board just paid $1000 for a blog; a page on Facebook or a Twitter account might earn them some real back to school money.
