UPDATE: Apparently Selberg is proposing this because the meetings are supposed to be family friendly;
“They’re getting a show that’s not very family friendly sometimes,” he said.
Makes you wonder how ‘family friendly’ the Continental Congress was? What a putz.
So the first action/legislation of new Vice-Chair Selberg is to tell the public their input doesn’t matter. I knew it wasn’t a good idea to elect him vice-chair. He is proposing the first reading on June 12th to move public input to the back of the meeting, Councilor Rick Kiley is expected to support the measure to get it on the agenda.
As I have mentioned in the past, this could seriously backfire on them if they pass this. You could get citizens sitting through the meetings and commenting on every single item. Than at the end of the meeting chewing out the council for some of the crappy decisions they made throughout the night. If you think the meetings are long now, just wait.
But what makes this even more egregious is that there hasn’t been a public discussion about this. They just had a working session about public input and NO one brought this up, in fact Councilor Neitzert specifically said he did not want to talk about it – obviously he knew about the proposal. The rumor is that Mayor TenHaken is pushing this behind the scenes and getting Lloyd Companies Realtor Selberg to do his dirty work.
I also believe the developers are behind it. I think after Lloyd Companies got their asses handed to them over the failed apartment land deal on 6th street they saw the power of public input and how it can squash their devious plans.
Councilor Theresa Stehly said this to me about the action, “It’s an assault on citizens free speech rights. A direct action to suffocate and annihilate the citizens voice at council meetings.”