Lansford Borough Council spent more than a few minutes Wednesday night talking about minutes.

These minutes are the official record of council’s meetings.

Resident Rose Mary Cannon pointed out numerous mistakes and errors in the minutes from earlier this year that were posted on the borough’s website.

“The first one had to do with the reorganization meeting,” she said. “There’s not a thing about reorganization. It has nothing about who is president, vice president … nothing about (former borough secretary) Wendy (Butrie) not being rehired.”

The minutes read like a jumbled up council and committee meeting, said Cannon, who formerly served on council.

“These are an embarrassment,” she said, adding that she does not blame the new secretaries who weren’t hired until a month after these meetings happened. “But for seven council members sitting here that read them and approved them. It’s terrible.

“They’re absolutely terrible,” Cannon said of the minutes.

Councilwoman Michele Bartek said that a council member took the minutes in absence of a borough secretary.

Cannon responded that the Council President Bruce Markovich was tapped to do the minutes and Markovich said he was told he couldn’t do the minutes as council president, when Bartek jumped back in.

“Can I ask a question?” Bartek said to Cannon. “Is anything that you’re going to say, let’s get to the bottom of it, be constructive and if you have any more ideas, we would be happy to hear positive things.”

Bartek then began to say, “However if you’re ..,” when cut off by Cannon and both women speaking over one another. Markovich then intervened and told Bartek, “Just tone it down a little bit.”

Cannon explained that she didn’t bring up the issue to embarrass anyone, but the minutes become part of the formal record of the borough.

“I think these need to be looked over before they are actually put into the permanent record,” she said.

Bartek calmly asked which minutes had mistakes, and Cannon said all six of them that were uploaded to the website did.

“Some are worse than others,” Cannon said.

Cannon also took issue with the assistant secretary handling the minutes, and not the borough secretary. Markovich said he believed either could do the minutes.

When council hired the two new secretaries for the borough, they stated their intent was to cross train them.

Cannon said the borough code spells out the duties of the borough secretary, and the assistant only performs them in the secretary’s absence.

Following the lengthy discussion about mistakes in the minutes, who was supposed to take the minutes and what the secretaries could do to improve the minutes, council agreed to look at them with no formal vote.

The only formal vote was on three sets of minutes: monthly meeting minutes from March 13; zoning and code committee meeting minutes from March 21 and committee minutes from April 2.

Markovich asked for a motion to approve the March 13 minutes, followed by a long silence as council members read over the minutes.

“Anybody?” Markovich asked after a minute of continued silence and Solicitor Bob Yurchak suggested to Markovich a motion to table.

Resident Joe Genits pointed out that council appeared to be reading the minutes, and took the opportunity to ask questions about uploading minutes to the website for public viewing.

Both Bartek and Councilman Joseph Butrie found mistakes and asked for corrections. Council approved the minutes with corrections, and also approved the minutes from the March 21 and April 2 meetings.

Markovich asked if they could approve minutes from a meeting they didn’t attend, as Markovich and some others weren’t at the March 21 meeting. However, a few council members who voted yes quickly said that they were there.