Simpson pressing for process changes on City Council
If you’ve seen a City Council meeting recently you might have noticed one Council Member voting no on the consent agenda. This is somewhat unusual since those are items considered non-controversial, but Council Member Dennis Simpson has begun voting this way as part of a larger attempt to change how the City Council does business.
Simpson has only been on council for about three months and he said he’s still got a lot to learn, but that he’s trying to change some council policies to increase transparency. He’s had some wins and been told to wait in other areas.
“The response on all this stuff is, ‘Dennis you want to go too fast,’ ” Simpson said.
His consent agenda stance specifically has to do with how the council approves contracts, which it does in the consent agenda. Simpson’s stance is that contracts, sometimes for multimillion dollar projects, should get a more thorough review by the City Council.
He also said that approving them in the consent agenda violates the council’s own policy, which requires it to review and approve expenditures over $200,000.
“I guess I believe that that policy is being abused the way we’re doing it now,” Simpson said. “Surely, when people wrote that policy and said the council has to review big money stuff they didn’t mean rubber stamp it. They meant think about it. Have the contract available to read. Read it if you want. Let the public see it.”
He said attempts to get contracts put on the regular agenda and to have the contracts themselves included in the council’s packet have been met with some resistance. Hence the no vote. Simpson has been able to read the contracts by visiting City Hall.
He then makes notes and submits written comments or questions. Voting no gets them put into the meeting minutes, he said.
“What I do now is I vote no on the consent agenda,” Simpson said. “That’s the only way I can get my comments into the record. Even though there are six things on the consent agenda and I’m totally in favor of five of them, in order to get anything done I have to vote no on all six of them.”
Most of Simpson’s concerns that have arisen in public meetings have been around process. He said he’d like work sessions to be treated more like regular meetings with motions and votes rather than consensus decisions, follow Robert’s Rules of Order and for them to be televised and streamed live.
He also wants executive sessions to open and adjourn as public meetings that people can view before voting to enter executive session.
Many of the issues Simpson has raised will begin to be addressed, Mayor Chuck McDaniel said. The City Council will hold a work session in mid-August focused on establishing policies and rules for how the council works.
“Dennis has raised several matters about how the council operates internally and externally and those are matters that we are going to begin to take up on the 16th of August in our workshop,” McDaniel said. “The entire workshop is right now going to be held on policies and procedures basically to talk about how we work together and setting up some written policies and procedures to guide how we do our business.”
McDaniel said a strategic planning meeting will also partly discuss how City Council members can work together more effectively.
Simpson said some changes have already been made.
In some instances the council has voted on an issue in a special meeting before a work session or taken a vote on staff direction in a regular meeting following a work session discussion. He said he’s seen some positive change with how the city conducts executive sessions as well.
While he has raised issues he’s had with the process as they arise, Simpson said he’s waiting to address other issues. Specifically he said he wants to have a more specific process for evaluating the city manager’s job performance, which has not yet come up during Simpson’s time on the board.
“I think the most important thing the council does is to hire and evaluate the city manager,” Simpson said. “In order to do that I think we need to set jointly negotiated goals and objectives for the city manager and we have to define how we’re going to evaluate progress on those goals and objectives without having a whole lot of opinion involved in it.”
While Simpson said he knows his comments can be seen as negative, but that he has respect for his fellow council members and that he thinks the city staff are doing a good job.
“I feel good about a lot of things and not just the things I’m pressing for myself because I think we have a good listening group of people,” Simpson said.
No comments:
Post a Comment