The new year is a time to reflect on bad habits and come up with ways to

break them. In that spirit, we suggest Cayuga County and the city of Auburn officials take a hard look at their most effective tool for communicating with the public - their Web sites.

Both purport to have meeting minutes, which is a great concept.

Unfortunately, those valuable public records are woefully out of date.

Interested to know what#,s been happening in the county Legislature? The most recent meeting minutes on-line are from May. Some of the Legislature#'s committee minutes are even more ancient - the minutes from Ways and Means stop in February. If you wanted to know what happened in Public Works, you#'d have to travel back in time to March. At least it would be spring. The Government Operations Committee does not list any minutes, perhaps this is because they#'ve accomplished nothing during the past year. We don#'t feel the same way about the Public Safety committee, but they#,ve also failed to post anything.

The Auburn City Council does a little better, with its most recent posting from the Sept. 23 city council meeting. But curiously, the minutes from the meeting where Councilor David Dempsey gave Mayor Tim Lattimore a shiner are not on the Web. That meeting was in October. The City of Auburn Planning Board, though, deserves some props. It has posted the November minutes, which were the most recently approved.

That board should give the rest some lessons.

Finding that a Web site doesn#,t have the information it advertised is like buying a box of cereal only to find that it's empty when you get home from

the store. You#,re left frustrated and you don#'t want to shop there anymore.

Ultimately, keeping Web sites updated is a form of customer service. The county and the city are letting their customers down.