A recent review of a debate whether the Rosemead City Clerk should create verbatim minutes of an April 3 council meeting show the advantages — and disadvantages — of having word for word transcribed:

John Tran: He wants the minutes – Mr. Taylor wants the minutes to be verbatim.

John Nunez: Can I – before we vote, can I also say a, the kind of problems that perbatim, perbatim, excuse me.

John Tran: Verbatim

John Nunez: Verbatim minutes have caused the City Council in – the problems that we have minutes that were like, oh, I don’t know, Nina could probably help me how late they were coming in and things like that. Because it was perbatim, there were stacks this big and if somebody really wanted to hear what somebody said, they can come and listen to the tapes. And (inaudible) and then, and then for a while there, we had a, minutes, prescribed, prescribed by yourself and not and then give them to us, and we still had to actually read, read them and go over to make sure they were correct through the, through the a, through the tapes and sometimes they were and

Gary Taylor: And they…

John Nunez: I imagine most the times they were…

Gary Taylor: I’m glad you said that.

In the end, the council voted to get the minutes verbatim. John Nunez and John Tran, however, voted against it.