So the Mayor (chair of meetings) and councilors Cole, Soehl and Barranco were absent tonight, which left only 5 councilors to make decisions (which is a quorum). The chair CAN vote when the mayor is absent.
What made it even more ironic is that councilor Jensen decided to ‘phone it in’ and had the audacity to try to cut off a public inputer several times. She actually shut him down and continued. BRAVO. Later during public input I informed the council that we have the right to talk about ANY city business on ANY item and they need to STOP interrupting people.
Public input bothers the administration and some councilors so much there is now over a one minute delay if you watch the meeting on CityLink.
I also asked the council tonight after they approved a project for Nielson construction (item #76) if the same company is moving forward with the affordable housing project that got a TIF from the council last year. I don’t think the council should approve any projects for this developer until they break ground on the TIF project. You told us we needed this and it was workable. So when is it going to happen?
Also, on a side note, I encourage the media to live stream the Lenin’s Tomb (zoo animals) meeting tomorrow. If we can’t get transparency out of the administration it is the duty of the 4th estate to pony up. I also encourage members of the public to protest the public input denial at the beginning of the meeting. While there is some gray area when it comes to public input and state law, it is pretty obvious this is an official meeting that doesn’t have the normal carve outs. They are discussing city business publicly during a work session and that falls under the purview of state law and public input. Before the current whatever was mayor the city council used to hold work sessions in the lobby of Carnegie to discuss pending policies, nothing set in stone, just throwing ideas out there and during this the public was invited and encouraged to input. This meeting is no different. I would suggest though if they make a motion to do public input to put it at the end so constituents can respond to what was discussed. Having it at the beginning would NOT be beneficial to the committee or the public.