By Noah Dawson
What little trust I had left for our city leaders has worn extremely thin over the past few weeks, especially with the new meeting times. Yesterday, I mentioned during the public comment meeting that I was still upset that the meetings were not actually being held for the full hour. I mentioned that I believed that they were still advertised online as lasting from noon until 1pm, as they had previously been. At least by the end of the meeting, which only lasted for 15 minutes, that was no longer true. Another point to note is that, unlike the first few weeks of the time change, the council members no longer spend the rest of the hour after the meeting interacting with the people in the audience. After this week’s meeting, the council was nowhere to be found until the regular meeting at 1pm.
Probably the worst part of this is that we the people have been severely misled by our leaders regarding the issue. The City Manager, Jared Miller, when the time change was still being worked out, said that they are “going to do the best [they] can to accommodate people’s needs.” If this is their best, their best is pathetic. He also said that they “just wanted to make sure that in no way [they] are reducing people’s accessibility to the council.”
If our leaders really are wanting to be productive, accommodate the people’s needs, and avoid reducing accessibility, their decision to change the way the meetings are advertised, by no longer showing them as lasting until 1pm, was the wrong decision. The council needs to actually fix these broken meetings.
Being able to speak weekly is important, and not just for “frequent flyers” such as myself. If somebody, even somebody who would otherwise never even consider attending a meeting, finds themselves in a situation where they need to address the council, they need to be able to be confident the council will hear them. Our city needs to listen to the people, and they need to take the people seriously. As Mike Fisher, another person who speaks at council meetings on a weekly basis has often said, the city could avoid the next Mike Fisher. They could do this by listening to the people. By limiting their exposure to we the people, they are making their position even riskier. By alienating the public, they create new problems rather than fixing ones that already exist.
The council can still try to fix this problem though. Councilmember Hays responded to my open letter last week, said that she “will take my suggestions into consideration.” She, along with Mayor Nelson, were absent from the public comment meeting this week, so I can only hope they will be there next week to announce their plans to at least partially correct the mistakes made over the last few weeks.
