The board of trustees are elected officials and there should be an easy way of getting in contact with them.
It seems to be a clear standard practice for government agencies to have contact information available for elected representatives. El Camino doesn’t make it easy for you to contact the board of trustees or an individual board member.
If you go to EC’s website, there’s a page dedicated to the board of trustees. What’s on that page? A list of the scheduled board meetings with links to the meeting agendas. Another list of the board members with their name, what area they represent and when their term expires. But one thing is missing. How do you contact these people?
Other community colleges in the area such as Cerritos, Long Beach and Santa Monica College’s have similar webpages with contact information and phone numbers readily available to community members.
EC should do the same.
If you want to contact a board member you either have to Google them and hope you find their right contact information or you have to go search for the president’s office phone number and ask the presidents secretary for contact information.
Board president Bill Beverly said that he has never looked into the website to see if there is any contact information for him and he was surprised. Trustees John Vargas, Cliff Numark and Ken Brown didn’t seem to have a issue that there was no contact information for them.
It’s even easier to find contact information for Alex Vargas, a Hawthorne mayor and Trustee Vargas’ brother.
Trustees Vargas and Numark did say they would look into why there isn’t any contact info for them.
Trustee Mary Combs never responded to an email sent to her elcamino.edu address.
Trustee Brown was fine with the fact that there wasn’t any contact information for him on the college’s website. The board members also said that there isn’t a reason why there isn’t any information posted.
The board of trustees represents the people that live within the community college district. The board members say that people from within the community contact them regularly and that they have no problem getting in contact with them.
The bottom line is that the college and the board should make themselves more accessible to the public since they are elected officials. Posting contact information on the board webpage would solve that problem.
