When Mayor Dave Schmidt took office in May 2009, one of the first things he did was buy a camera so that City Council meetings could be videotaped and posted on-line for viewing by the public – to supplement the notoriously sketchy and even fickle meeting minutes.

But a camera is nothing without someone to man it, and Park Ridge was fortunate to have George Kirkland step forward to undertake that task.

We regularly hear about all the “volunteers” who do so much for this community.  And they do –  although some of them (including a few members of the City Council) seem to spend almost as much time patting themselves on the back as they do actually serving the community.  

Kirkland, on the other hand, performs his volunteer service the old-school way: He just shows up and quietly does his “job” – for two, three and even four hours some nights.  And that’s not just for City Council meetings, but for Committee of the Whole meetings and even special meetings like the budget workshops.  

Kirkland’s efforts (and those of Charlie Melidosian, who uploaded and hosted Kirkland’s videos on his Motionbox site for most of the past year) provided an object lesson on how much more information and insight into the workings of City government is available from videos than from the sources upon which we previously had to rely – even when those “workings” tend toward what Otto Von Bismarck compared to sausage-making.

And given City Staff’s and the Council’s historical resistance, if not outright hostility, to videotaping or televising meetings – by coming up with boxcar expense numbers that they knew would never fly – we suspect the track record of Kirkland’s mini-cam handiwork was no small factor in the City’s decision to post his videos on its website.

Because of the volunteer work of George Kirkland, we now enjoy more “transparency” in City government than ever before.

So here’s a big wag of the Watchdog’s tail to you, George…you most definitely deserve it!