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Wednesday, October 22, 2008

Free Laptops For Every Northampton County Council Member!

After the shouting match with Charles Dertinger was over yesterday, Council member Diane Neiper told me she believes it's time to start webcasting meetings, and will make inquiries next time they meet.

That's nice.

Then the Northampton County Bulldog, Ron Angle, let me in on a little secret. Free laptops have been provided to every council member, even though neither he nor council member Wayne Grube care for them. The money for this comes from the $650 thousand set aside for renovations to the Northampton County Star Chamber. No word of this was ever uttered in a public meeting.

Angle told me and an astonished county executive that there is even a hook up for these laptops on the brand new dais, although no one has bothered to try it.

Amazing. We are now approaching 100 scheduled sheriff sales every month. And council is surreptitiously supplying members with laptops, masked as renovation costs. Angle, no computer genius, is unsure whether the county is also paying for Internet hook ups.
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3 comments:

  1. LighthouseOctober 22, 2008 at 4:21 PM

    This will allow them to keep up with Lehigh Valley Ramblings, and maybe post an anonymous message now and then!

    I am sure an argument can be made about spending "here" to save "there" (these vs the long-term material and labor costs of paper meeting materials), but is there really a cost benefit? And how about the slippery slope of personal use for the commputers? Is there a protocol? Finally, I assume the public is not paying for home service so they can do there county business at home...right???

    ReplyDelete
  2. AnonymousOctober 22, 2008 at 6:41 PM

    Laptops do not sound like building renovations to me. Couldn't the council members simply use the dais hookups with their own computers? For the cost of all those computers, could they have provided video streaming of public meetings instead?

    ReplyDelete
  3. AnonymousOctober 23, 2008 at 9:54 PM

    They need laptops for council meetings? For surfing the web?

    O_o

    ReplyDelete

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