CCRC Sets Minimalist Agenda for 9/27 Meeting

Maybe you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover, but you often can judge a meeting by its agenda. Rule of thumb: The fewer details in the agenda, the less outside input is desired. That may be what's happening with the next meeting of the Comprehensive Communications Review Committee.

You’ll recall that this committee was established after the October 15th earthquakes to review emergency communications preparedness and recommend improvements in how to keep our citizens safe and informed in emergencies. The issue, after all, is public safety.

Here’s the agenda for the September 27th meeting:

Welcome

Group discussion on status of final committee recommendations and implementation status of those recommendations (by each organization).

Wrap-up

Not much transparency, but at least the CCRC is consistent; transparency hasn’t been much of a consideration for the group, as CHORE has reported since its creation in October. The CCRC has not held public meetings and has had virtually no public representation on the body.

Since the September meeting is shaping up as the CCRC’s final piece of business, let’s see if Honolulu’s reporters can pull themselves away from the daily grind of covering hurricanes, fires and tsunamis – each one a potential crisis -- long enough to do some long-range coverage of the CCRC’s recommendations before they go into effect.

In that regard, one of the recommendations by the group, which had strong representation from the telecommunications industry, was to rely on text messaging in future emergencies. Here’s an MSNBC story headlined When Cell Phones Fail that reports on the breakdown of the cellular phone networks after the Interstate 35W bridge collapsed in Minneapolis.

Citizens might well be skeptical about the CCRC’s recommendations regarding reliance on text messaging, in light of that incident and our own Earthquake Sunday experience. And even more important is the need for more transparency by a group that's planning for our future emergency communications needs.

At a minimum it could publish a detailed agenda.

NOTE: For a refresher on CHORE's objections to how State officials have treated the emergency communications issues since October, please visit our March 1st post here.