A protestor donned a donkey mask at South Ayrshire Council headquarters yesterday to express fury over an ongoing ban on public and media access to meetings.
Since March all council meetings on major decisions including planning applications and how money is being spent have taken place in private.
Many councils have allowed residents to view meetings virtually on systems such as Microsoft Teams during the pandemic. But South Ayrshire committees are still off-limits.
The dressed up protestor, who declared his identity as 'Ass,’ said: “I am a South Ayrshire resident and the council is making me feel like a donkey and taking me for a ride.”
Speaking outside the locked gates of County Buildings, Ayr, he added: “It is of the utmost importance that we have the right to see and hear what our elected officials and councillors are doing in our name.”
On Monday last week NHS Ayrshire & Arran allowed people and the media to log in and view the health board meeting on Microsoft Teams.
Alloway resident Andrew Russell, 67, has sent in complaints to the council about what he perceives as a lack of transparency.
The council is considering making meetings available to view online. But Mr Russell believes bosses could have already allowed access on Microsoft Teams or other systems easily.
Mr Russell said: “They have given us excuse after excuse. They are going for a bespoke system, which is taking forever and will be high maintenance. It looks like delaying tactics.
“It is possible. The health board are doing it.”
Current affairs news magazine Private Eye has even picked up on the virtual meeting saga.
Ayr town centre resident John Dunlop, 67, said he has challenged the lack of online access through the council’s ‘Listening to You’ process.
The former director of Citizens Advice Scotland said: “The gravity of this in a statutory body in a democracy simply cannot be ignored.
“Consider this, a council who truly lived by the credo of ‘Never Forget the People’ would have seized the opportunity to widen access to council meetings.”
Council officials have been looking into technical solutions to open up meetings online. Reports have been presented to councillors on the issue.
A South Ayrshire Council spokesman said: “A decision was taken by councillors at a full council meeting on March 24 to agree that any meetings which proceeded during the pandemic and which were conducted remotely did not require to have physical public attendance.
"The system we currently use is unable to directly broadcast a meeting to a wider audience and at the same time limit how participants are able to interact with the meeting. This functionality is necessary to meet the strict governance requirements for council meetings.
"We are procuring a new system, which should be in place in the spring, which will enable the public to access online meetings. In the meantime, the minutes of all our meetings are publicly available online."
At least 20 local authorities out of 32 in Scotland have already made meetings accessible online either live or afterwards.
East Ayrshire Council is still holding meetings in private and does not appear to have made any attempt to open up proceedings.
Meanwhile North Ayrshire Council has been webcasting meetings since the start of the pandemic.
