What you need to know
City Council deferred the decision to consolidate its work session and action meetings until a future meeting to allow for public feedback before moving forward. Currently, workshop meetings are held Wednesdays at 2 p.m. with regular meetings following on Thursday.
"I still strongly encourage that we don’t take action today," council member Howard Wood said. "We give it one more session or one more month, whatever is convenient there, but it gives our citizens time to input, because we report to them. I have a lot of citizens who can't be here because of work, so I fully support a 5 p.m. [or] 6 p.m. meeting.”
While the idea of consolidation was met with some agreement, concerns were raised about the length of meetings and the impact on city employees by council members Masha Porter and Shana Arthur.
“Our employees are not paid overtime,” Porter said. "If we have it all in one meeting, it’s going to be a very, very long meeting, possibly going until 9 or 10 p.m."
What they’re saying
- “One of the biggest complaints I get from citizens is it's hard for them to take two days off and come down here and meet with us, to sit through all this, and [with] the way that now [we conduct] open citizen inquiries ... it’s moved to the very end,” Wood said. “This ensures that going through one day with both the council and the workshop ensures that [citizens] have the ability to come down and meet with us.”
- "We serve our citizens, and I could not support anything that does not allow them to come after work," Mayor Duke Coon said. “I love the idea of having meetings, workshops and meetings together on Thursdays. Historically, the city did that in the past, it worked well, but it's open for discussion.”
- "I also believe that we this would work better with one day, because we do have our directors or our staff, our management staff, and with the changes in new leadership and getting better employees, we can rely more on their information that they give us without having to go and keep researching all the time," Arthur said.
