Julie Riley doesn’t just sit through each night of Town Meeting once.
In fact, she watches each night of Town Meeting twice — even the nights that stretch into four or more hours of debate.
Riley does this for every special and annual Town Meeting session, which can sometimes take Belmont’s legislative body as many as eight nights to complete. After watching a recording from each night of Town Meeting, she reads and reviews a copy of the meeting transcript — just as she has for the past 14 years as Belmont’s Town Meeting court stenographer.
“Belmont is probably my biggest challenge … because it’s tough,” she said. “I don’t think everybody who is a court reporter would be suited to do this.”
Her first watch is done live. Seated at the front of the auditorium, Riley captures a verbatim transcript of Town Meeting. Every motion, every comment, every “point of order” is recorded on a machine that has just 22 keys. That’s because, unlike a typist at a computer keyboard, who uses individual letters to create words, the court stenographer uses a steno machine that combines keystrokes to write words phonetically, broken into syllables. The stenography written by the stenographer is then translated into English using specialized software. The software allows each court stenographer to build their own steno-to-English dictionary, which they update as they encounter specialized words in the field.
“I do have a dictionary that’s purely for Belmont,” she said. “It has tons and tons of entries of things specific to Belmont — names, streets, places, boards, and committees. … If I’ve written it, it goes into the dictionary. It’s a constant updating of the dictionary.”
She added that the court stenographers who use these machines often have their own set of “briefs” — similar to texting shorthand — that they can add to their machine’s dictionary for increased efficiency.
Once she’s watched a recording of the meeting, Riley reads through her work, double-checking for any missed punctuation or spelling mistakes. She then submits an electronic and print copy to the town clerk’s office, where Town Clerk Ellen O’Brien Cushman said it is stored in a vault. The electronic copies are searchable by word.
For Riley, a Northborough resident, the Belmont gig has been in the making since her college days, when she took a part-time job for a woman named Marianne Kusa-Ryll, who happened to be the court stenographer for Belmont at the time. After a summer of helping Kusa-Ryll with house-related tasks, she was offered a job proofing Kusa-Ryll’s transcripts of Belmont Town Meeting.
Eventually, Riley graduated from school with a degree in computer science, but after a few years in the industry, a recession forced her to change course. Kusa-Ryll suggested she look into becoming a court stenographer, a job that would offer her a bit more flexibility with her life.
“I said, ‘Alright, I’m going to try this,’” she said. “So I went back to school and … the rest is history.”
The first six months of the program were focused entirely on learning the keys, Riley said. From there, the goal was to build speed. Riley recalled sitting in front of her television, practicing the skill by transcribing the daily newscasts. In 1995, she practiced while watching the O.J. Simpson trial.
“It all comes down to working on the machine and perfecting the skill,” she said.
In 1995, Riley earned her associate’s degree and became a certified court stenographer. At the time, she was certified at 225 words per minute. Now, she’s certified as a registered diplomate stenographer at 260 words per minute.
In addition to speed, court reporting is a skill that requires incredible focus, she said.
“Sometimes, that’s the hardest thing,” Riley said. “Sometimes, there’s a sound or people are talking behind me, and I’m hearing that, and I’m trying to tune them out. It definitely can be distracting.”
To mitigate distractions, she has an earpiece connected to the microphone. Town Meeting also provides her with a break at around 9 p.m., giving her a chance to clear her head.
“It does take a lot of focus skills, and that’s definitely a part of the job that you just have to key in on,” she said.
The majority of her work is transcribing depositions, but she also does some court reporting and has worked for the deaf and hard-of-hearing community. And of course, she attends every one of Belmont’s special and annual Town Meetings.
“Every job I take is different,” she said. “I learn something every time … whether I’m taking a doctor or an expert witness, or just a regular ordinary person, or the town’s people — I learn something. I’ve learned so many things about town government that I never would have known if I didn’t do the Town of Belmont Town Meetings.”
And after 30 years, Riley still takes great pride in the times she accurately and efficiently transcribes a challenging bit of audio from a court session, deposition, or Town Meeting session.
“I hope [court stenography] is here for a while,” she said. “There’s the threat of [alternative intelligence], but … I don’t think you can beat a human brain, even with a really smart computer — not yet, anyway. … If you have a person here who’s responsible for [a confidential record], I think you’re in better shape than going with a computer that somebody could alter.”
