If Wellington County council wants to be truly open and transparent, it needs to make some radical changes in the way it conducts government business. Maintaining "openness and transparency" is the reason there's no longer an "other business" category on the county agenda. It can be a catch-all item where councillors can introduce just about anything - including controversial issues - without the public having any advance warning they're coming up. The idea is that the public needs to be able to get information on every item to be discussed on the agenda. In that way, the county is exemplary. It provides massive amounts of detail about issues, meetings, agendas, and services through its website and other communications. The problem, as some have pointed out recently, is that county council and its committees are not very easy to get to. Regular county council and committee meetings are scheduled during the day. To attend one, you have to be retired, self-employed, unemployed, or take a day off work. Full council meetings start at 10 a.m., and despite a detailed and open agenda, the public has no idea what time the various items are due to be discussed. Lengthy delegations or a long closed meeting segment can push committee business into the afternoon. Meetings have wrapped up anywhere between noon and 6 p.m. Committee meetings, where most of the real debate and discussion goes on, can be even more difficult to get to. They're all listed on the county website, with locations noted - but finding the boardroom in the county administration office can be difficult without directions, and finding the boardroom in Wellington Terrace where information, heritage and seniors is held can be even harder. Neither boardroom is large - more than a handful of people would overwhelm the extra seating, if not the room itself. Sometimes during budget discussions, staff attending the administration, finance and personnel committee force it to move to a lunchroom nearby - which is even more difficult to find. Not that driving from the far corners of the county to downtown Guelph is particularly convenient for taxpayers either. People aren't beating down the doors to get into these meetings. One of our local ward councillors has said she's virtually unknown around the area now that she's been elected to county council. Another has somewhat colourfully said most people don't care what county council does - and he's right. But people should be interested - the county takes more than half of the local tax bill, and from now to the end of February staff and councillors are working on budgets. People may never be interested enough to turn up by the hundred to watch meetings and comment. But there are some concrete ways the county could make its deliberations more accessible to local people. Move meetings around the county so people in Centre Wellington, Mapleton, Mount Forest, and so on don't have to drive up to an hour to go to a meeting.  Schedule meetings for the evening, when the public isn't working. That would mean the end of the ponderous six-hour sessions, but that's not a bad thing. Or - here's a thought - televise meetings on local community cable channels so people can watch what's going on. That would enable anyone interested to get details of business without the inconvenience, and might get some more people mildly interested in what's going on "around the horseshoe" - especially during budget time. Getting rid of "other business" is a small but positive step. But in an era of government "transparency", it's time for the county to take some giant steps in the same direction.