INDIANTOWN – The Village Council here voted unanimously Oct. 8 to approve a Development Application Transparency Administrative Policy proposed by some of its members in response to the clamor of area residents angered that at last one now-former employee had signed a non-disclosure agreement over a data center development application.
That uproar earlier this year led to a rout of the three incumbent Council members up for reelection last August, the subsequent firing of the Village manager and resignation of both the Village attorney and development director. Interim Village Attorney Janet Smith introduced the agenda item that evening with a brief description.
The Council hired Smith the night long-time Village Attorney Wade Vose resigned because of his prior advice to Council against implementing a moratorium on data center applications, which many community members and the new Board majority wanted and is now in the works.
The Board approved the drafting of both the moratorium and the transparency policy on Sept. 10.
“This is a resolution of the Village of Indiantown, Florida approving a development transparency policy that provides for a publicly available development application registry and notification system, providing for implementation and an effective date,” Smith said.
Councilman Anthony Dowling immediately suggested amending the draft.
“The only thing that I would like to add to this transparency policy is if the Council could be notified if we’re getting pre-qualifications,” he said. “That was one of the things I saw as an issue. Even if the project doesn’t come to light, I think the Council should know about it.”
Mayor Phyllis Waters-Brown agreed.
“It tells us when somebody is doing more than thinking about bringing something to us,” she said. “It also sets up the Development Review Committee meetings, so we’ll know when that’s coming. The application’s likely to change, but at least we’ll know it’s in the process.”
That prompted Smith to pose a clarification question.
“Do you want that in the policy or is that direction to the manager to bring that to the Council members?” she asked.
“I think it needs to be in the policy,” Mayor Waters Brown responded.
“Will it be strictly for the Council or for the public?” Smith prodded.
“For the public,” Councilwoman Janet Hernandez insisted.
When Smith spoke of the registration process and including the pre-application information with the active applications and any approvals already planned as part of the policy, the mayor wanted to know how registered users would know when those documents become available.
“Do we get notification, or are we going to check every day to see if there’s something there?” she asked.
“This goes back to the technology with your current Tyler [Technologies] System,” the attorney explained. “If you register and subscribe, when there’s a hit in the system, that email goes out to the public and that provides transparency across the board. I think you just want it build into the system at the pre-app stage.”
A subsequent comment by Councilmember Vernestine Williams-Palmer on how applications coming back from the Development Review Committee change their assigned reference codes after the pre-app stage prompted Smith to defer to Interim Village Manager Michael Giardino. His description, however, emphasized the difficulty of providing every detail to the public.
“The vision would be a live dashboard,” he said. “Applications are received [and] that is a major muscle movement, a transaction is made, that’s going to pop. “Yes, there’s a pre-app, yes there’s a DRC, but there could be 10 to 20 amendments of a document. What we’re trying to do is cut down on that noise, so all you’re seeing is the real stuff of the application. My vision would be a dashboard that’s easy to read and information you want.”
Both Giardino and Smith spoke of the potential elevated cost to the Village because the current Tyler system is very limited in its public access components.
“Again, I have to work with the software vendor on this,” the former said. “What we show has to be readable, not read/write because we don’t people in the public able to manipulate our documents. Whatever we can show on this new dashboard, we’re going to do it. If there’s a module or something else that we’ll build onto it, we’ll do that too.”
Much of the subsequent discussion devolved into the merits of Tyler Technologies software, which was openly criticized by Councilwoman Williams-Palmer who parroted comments she’d heard previously from two area residents who spoke during the following public comment period. She believed the company was not giving the Village its money’s worth.
“We don’t need to be paying for stuff they promised to take care of,” she exclaimed. “Now, Eric Miller said something about it, Melissa [Hague] said something about it. So, what are we paying for, mistakes?”
For his part, Finance Director Michael Florio defended the municipal software company, which the Village is currently paying approximately $80,000 annually for its Software as a Service program.
“We’re 95 percent complete with everything we’ve purchased,” he said.
Shortly afterward, Hague came to the podium and criticized the public access currently offered by Tyler, but that’s not the system Giardino’s hoping to implement by the end of October.
“Tyler is absolutely awful for any one of the members of the public right now trying to get transparency and find development documents in a portal,” she said. “I hope that Council will be trained on how to access Tyler.”
Miller, who lives just outside the corporate limits of the Village, didn’t openly criticize Tyler by name but instead offered his own software to the Village for a fee.
“What’s actually broken by them will never be fixed by them because they don’t want it fixed,” he said in a veiled reference to Tyler Technologies. “I have the software that [does] everything Mike’s talking about doing, and I can help you figure out which switches to turn. Don’t look to the same people that broke it to fix it for you. If you would like professional services, I’m happy to answer under RFP [bid] You might actually find a way to shut me up that way.”
After a brief Board/staff debate that settled on 10 business days for developer documents to go online for the public, Smith told the Board that it would be better to include that in a list of future procedures and not in the policy itself.
Council member Anthony Dowling then made a motion to amend the draft policy to include pre-application meeting notifications, which was seconded by Vice-Mayor Miley and passed unanimously.
A document from Florio that Giardino sent to the Hometown News Oct. 13 stated that Indiantown was nearing the end of Year 2 of a five-year contract with Tyler Technologies.