The Winslow City Council approved a motion by Mayor Tom McCauley to establish a social media presence for the City of Winslow.
McCauley said, “I wanted to talk about transparency and being able to get our message out to everyone. There is no central location for everybody in Winslow to go to find all of the information that we need.” He explained that the need for an official City of Winslow Facebook page was imminent. “We need to be able to see everything from the recreation department, the library, and from city hall and all of these places.” McCauley expressed a desire to include meeting agendas and minutes on the page as well as job announcements and board and commission recruiting.
Councilwoman Samantha Crisp said, “My pros list is twice as long as my cons list. It is an easy way to reach our target audience and it’s free.”
Councilman Robin Boyd said, “Running a Facebook page can be pretty time consuming, so we would have to pay someone to do it. I also don’t want it to be a controversial site, if someone has a question, we direct them to staff, but not a long controversial thing.”
McCauley replied stating, “Mr. Pauken posts now, he can post to our page. Same with the library, or recreation department, we are already doing the work. Honestly I think we can do much better getting our information out there.”
Councilman Ricky Jackson said, “The only concern I have with it, is would a city employee on city time be responsible? What would that entail?”
McCauley explained, “What I am envisioning is this is an informational page only, not for conversation. Just a ton of information coming to the public and it’s free. The most active page I see within the city is from the Police Department, why not have them post on the city’s page?”
Pauken stated, “I agree that there is more than one way to structure a Facebook page. It can be as open or as closed as you want it to be. I’m just going to throw it out there, because it is true, there are a lot of people from city staff who contribute to different Facebook pages. You’ll find that a lot of those posts are going up on our personal time. There is a time consumption factor and therefore a cost. That free Facebook page will cost a lot of labor.”
He then explained his concern that posting on social media could become a condition of employment. “I don’t see it as something that should be a condition of employment and I don’t think that someone should be looked down upon for not posting something. If you kept track of how much time it actually takes to get all of that information out there, you would have enough time to hire a public information officer, problem is you don’t have the money for a public information officer.”
McCauley concluded, “The information we need to have on the page is already out there, we just need to put it all in one place, one stop shopping.”
Councilwoman Crisp made the motion to approve the creation of a City of Winslow Facebook page, which was seconded by Councilman Marshal Losey. “I would move that we approve the creation of the page as information only, with no commentary,” said Losey.
The motion carried unanimously in the absence of Vice Mayor Bob Schlesinger.
