Civic calendar disappears from Woodstock website

Check out the new look to the Community Calendar on http://www.woodstockil.gov/

If you have tried to follow civic meetings of the various boards and commissions of the City and even the meetings of the City Council itself, your efforts will now be much harder to dind out if and when they meet.

These meetings used to be shown on the Community Calendar on the homepage of the City's website. From a look at the Calendar over the summer and even now, the biggest event of the century has been Horses of a Different Color. Does that even benefit Woodstock? And you'll find the Mozart Festival and the McHenry County Fair there, too.

But you will not find the City Council meetings, the Historic Preservation Commission, the Board of Fire and Police Commissioners or any of the other IMPORTANT boards and commissions (they are all important).

In an era of demands for transparency in government, Woodstock has taken a huge step BACKWARDS by removing these meeting from the Calendar.

It was bad enough that the City immediately removed official meetings from the Calendar as soon as they were over. That was all programmed. A little checkmark in the box to retain the meeting on the Calendar (or not to delete it after the scheduled time) would have solved that problem.

Earlier this year, when I inquired why meetings were so quickly removed from the Calendar, the answer was that it was programmed that way. Well, of course, it was; and it would have been just as easy to program it another way.

The problem is that the huge majority of people in Woodstock don't care. Just so long as it is not in their own backyards, they don't get involved.

Come on, folks. Start showing up. Start caring about Woodstock. Show up at City Council meetings. Speak out during the Public Comment period. Act for definite action and follow up to find out if it happens. If it doesn't, show up again. Also, it never hurts to show up and say Thanks.