No Comments For You!
Council Puts the Kibosh on Citizen Remarks
If you can’t attend a City Council meeting on a Thursday night, no bother, you can just watch it online.
The most interesting part is always the public comments.
Citizens can show up in person at Irving City Hall before 7:00pm and get to speak for three minutes on any topic. Citizen comments is a way for citizens to put their concerns directly in front of our city’s leadership, at the start of the meeting.
Well, at least they used to be.
From the first meeting of this year:
Hmm. That motion and vote sure happened quickly.
Then another weird thing happened. Comments were not merely moved to the end, when most everyone had left, they were not televised. However, as this was not in the motion that was passed, ICTN seems to have gotten the message in advance.
At the next meeting, they tried to clean things up:
Even weirder! Choreographed. No deliberation. Just a quick unanimous vote.
Certainly appears like this may have been decided in advance. Council is supposed to deliberate in the open, according to the Texas Open Meetings Act. Apart from TOMA, it seems strange.
Not that it’s a bad thing that they did this, though.
We then discovered just this the next meeting. Comedian Alex Stein got up to do his act … and bombed. His stich has gotten painful and this video is not worth watching:
Freedoms are a great thing. They depend on not being abused. When abused like this, it’s not surprising we get things like unanimous votes to bump citizen comments from being front-and-center on the agenda and on the broadcast.
There are other ways to deal with things, however. Why not just enforce the rules of procedure on decorum? Or if they need to be changed, update them?
In making this change we are at the forefront. The standard practice in other cities is broadcasting full meetings with citizen comments included. So we are a trend setter. But do we want to be?
For a change of this magnitude, the perfunctory and precipitous way it was done feels off.
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