Brian Sweeting

I am a resident of Payson City and tonight I decided to attend the City Council meeting. The first thing I did is to check the city website for an agenda to see if there was anything I might be interested in. No luck. So then I decide that I’ll just go check the meeting out anyway, since I have not attended a CC meeting since I’ve lived here. Now wait a minute…what time does the meeting start? A quick check of the city’s website again leaves me in need of information. So I call the city offices to find out what time the meeting is. I must have called about 6 times within 20 minutes each time getting a message telling me they were “receiving a high volume of calls” and to “please call back later”. “Hmm”, I thought, “must be getting tons of calls from people who can’t get information from the website.”

I have been in talks with Payson City before about working on their website, but either the budget isn’t available or in other cases they say they have found someone to work on it for free. But it is my opinion that they would be serving the citizens 100 times better even if they resorted to setting up a $4.95 per month TypePad account and just having city employees post information in blog format. This may not be ideal, but at least there would be a way for the information to get online.

Looking at Payson’s current website leaves me feeling like I’ve been magically whisked away to 1994. On second thought, it’s worse, because even in 1994 websites had content.