This week is Sunshine Week in Pennsylvania, where issues involving government transparency are highlighted across the state. MoreThanTheCurve.com, of course, will focus on Conshohocken, West Conshohocken, Plymouth Township, and Whitemarsh Township. We will do one article Monday through Friday on different aspects of transparency.

Today, we are going to focus on something that isn’t required by law, but isn’t hard to do, and has become more and more prevalent over the past decade. Not offering it is a choice. The issue is the availability of public meetings on video, or at least audio.

For MoreThanTheCurve.com’s purposes, these recordings are important as it allows us to watch more meetings and offer more detailed reporting. For the public, it makes their local government more accessible and gives much more information than minutes.

Across the four municipalities we cover, there are often meetings scheduled against one another, or we have a personal conflict. So it greatly helps with our coverage if we can’t be there.

Being able to include video or audio with our reporting, also allows the public to hear what we are reporting on for themselves, so it also acts to hold us accountable. It also allows for more timely reporting, as video and audio are usually provided by the next day, vs. having to wait for the minutes to be voted on at a future meeting.

Here is how we score the local municipalities on this issue. The first five points reflect to how they handle meetings of elected officials. The additional five points represent the availability of meetings such as planning and zoning.

Borough of Conshohocken | Score 7 out of 10
Conshohocken has begun adding meetings of the borough council to YouTube.com, which is a big improvement. However, planning commission videos are still regulated to the borough’s website and zoning hearings aren’t offered at all.

Borough of West Conshohocken | Score 0 out of 10
We know West Conshohocken is working on this, but currently it offers no audio or video recordings of public meetings.

Plymouth Township | Score 9 out of 10
Plymouth is currently the best at this. You get video or audio of council, planning, zoning, and even some lesser meetings. Everything is readily available on YouTube.com.

Why not 10 out of 10? The audio recordings aren’t the best.

Whitemarsh Township | Score 4 out of 10
While Whitemarsh’s supervisors normally only meet once per month and those videos are available. However, when it does meet a second time, those videos aren’t available. The township also doesn’t offer audio or video for planning or zoning meetings. What it does offer is available on YouTube.com.