Marana has a new social-media policy for its employees, and Councilman Jon Post won't have to un-friend Councilwoman Carol McGorray on Facebook because of it.
At its Oct. 6 meeting, the Marana Town Council approved a new policy governing how town employees may use social media — such as Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google and Yahoo! news groups and YouTube — to publicize official town services and events.
The vote was 6-0 with Councilwoman Roxanne Ziegler absent.
Under the new policy, all official town social-media sites will be administered by the public information officer — Rodney Campbell — for the limited purpose of informing the public about town business, services and events.
The town's Web site, www.marana.com, will continue to serve as the main conduit of information about the town, town manager Gilbert Davidson told the council.
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Individual departments are not allowed to have their own pages or sites on social-media networks but may make a request to Campbell if they wish to add something to the town's official social-media pages or sites.
At a previous council meeting, Post joked that he would be willing to drop McGorray as his Facebook friend in order to stay on the right side of open-meetings laws.
At the end of Davidson's presentation last week, Post drew chuckles from the audience and other council members by saying, "So Carol still gets to be my friend on Facebook, right?"
That wasn't really the issue, Campbell said in an interview.
"They (council members) could be friends with more than two other council members, but you wouldn't want them instant messaging with each other in a group environment," he said.
Open meetings law dictates that when a quorum of an elected body — in this case, four out of Marana's seven council members — will be present together somewhere, the public must receive advance notice.
The social-media situation is new territory for municipalities, Campbell said, and staff discussed possible problems with open meetings laws when it was formulating the new policy.
"I'm sure we're going to see a lot of legal opinions being made on it in the next year," he said, referring generally to social-media policies.
In other news, Marana Regional Airport interim director Orville Saling gave a presentation outlining how the tiny airport can expand as part of the town's overall vision for the future.
The town needs to bring in more corporate aviation, he said, because it seems to him the airport currently operates as a very expensive country club for private people who keep their planes there.
The airport could also use an enterprise fund and some objective measures of function and growth, he said.
And it needs to look again at its price structure, he said, noting that some people with planes based at the Marana airport will fly elsewhere to buy fuel and have their airplanes worked on.
"We tend to be overpriced," Saling said.
Hiring an airport manager — which was listed later on the meeting agenda — would do a lot to help the operation move forward, he said.
Later in the meeting, the council voted 6-0 to hire a new airport manager with a salary range of $55,000 to $82,500.
