When city commissioners changed their twice-a-month meeting time from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m., they said they hoped the late-in-the-day start would encourage more citizen participation. With only two meetings held at the new time, it’s too early to draw any conclusions, but so far nobody has taken advantage of the public speaking time near the end of the meeting.
It didn’t help that the audience participation part of the meeting came at 4:37 p.m. today and 5:03 p.m. two weeks ago — inopportune times for somebody who wants to come to the meeting after a typical 9-to-5 work day.
Commissioner Scott Franklin touched on the issue Friday during an agenda study session when he asked some questions about the new meeting time.
He said he thought the new meeting schedule would follow the protocol used for the last couple of years: The first hour of the meeting was used for presentations and proclamations, which sometimes draw large crowds, and the business portion of the meeting started an hour later.
Instead, at the Sept. 4 meeting — the first under the new schedule — the commission rolled into the business meeting around 3:40 p.m., not at 4, as Franklin had expected. (Today, the business portion of the meeting started at 3:36 p.m.)
Franklin mentioned two concerns:
- People with business before the commission won’t know what time to show up if they want to skip the preliminaries.
- Meetings that end before 5 don’t give people a chance to come after work.
“It makes it kind of vague for people who want to show up on time because they don’t know if we’re starting the real agenda at 3:15 or 4 o’clock or whatever,” Franklin said Friday. “To me, backing up the real agenda to 4 meant that there would still probably be a significant amount of the conversation after 5 o’clock, but that’s not really going to be the case if we have a short agenda and a few proclamations; we’ll be done by 5 and that really wasn’t what I thought our intent was.”
Commissioner Phillip Walker said that he, too, thought the idea was to extend meetings until after 5 so working people could come to at least part of the meeting.
Mayor Bill Mutz said he likes the efficiency of “moving right on into the meeting. Maybe we would want to consider a 4 o’clock start instead of a 3 o’clock start for the entire meeting if we’re trying to preserve that objective.”
There was no further discussion of a 4 p.m. start.
Commissioner Justin Troller said he would have preferred a later start but he thought the 3 p.m. was a good compromise to avoid overtime pay for city employees who attend the meetings. Others have said the early start also helps companies avoid paying higher after-hours fees to consultants attending the meetings, he said.
In addition, Troller and other commissioners noted that some people might find it easier to take off the last two hours of the day instead of taking off at the beginning of the work day and not knowing how many hours they would have to be gone from work.
Somebody who wants to speak to the commission on a general topic could safely come to a meeting at 4 p.m. since meetings never last less than an hour, Troller said.
The audience participation part of City Commission meetings allows anybody who wants to address the commission to speak for up to five minutes. It is usually the next-to-last thing that happens. After that, the commissioners have a chance to deliver any announcements they have, and then the meeting ends.
The commission meets the first and third Monday each month, except when a holiday falls on the meeting day.
Here’s video from Friday’s discussion of meeting times:
Agenda Study 9-14 The Start from Michael Maguire on Vimeo.
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code enforcement board meetings used to start at 3 PM until they starting lasting anywhere from 3-5 hours. The difference being the city commission limits the speaking time and the CEB board does not as it purely citizen driven with no business agenda other than a few mass motions at the end. The meeting times have been changed to 1:30……,If the citizens are aware when they need to be there trust me they will be