How to watch a city commission meeting

How to watch a city commission meeting

November 2009 Update: The last couple of years have seen some ugly city commission meetings, and city hall observers are hoping that the three newly elected commissioners can change the tone. The guidelines below remain useful as the bodies change.

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Individual commissioners (and, to a degree, the mayor*) display characteristics which bear watching:

1. Do they favor decisions which seek to control or decisions which seek to liberate -- people, policies, procedures, plans?

2. Do they permit their fondness or dislike toward a person or a city department or a concept to dominate their decision-making?

3 Do they regularly use nit-picnicking as a technique to win a point, to stall deliberations, to wear down their opposition, simply to posture for the public?

Pay attention to when they reveal those characteristics, most often unintentionally. Is there a pattern to the types of issues which most interest them? Bore them? Irritate them? Delight them?

Try to predict how the vote will go on a given issue. If you can predict an individual's vote almost every time, that official is operating from feelings, not thought. (There have been too many commissioners like that in the past, but that problem hasn't been as severe with the 42nd commission.)**

Sure, it's fun to join VersagiVoice in chiding this or that commissioner for talking too much or protesting too much or bullying or wandering or whining. That adds a personal dimension to the dialogues, and VersagiVoice readers tell us that including the human touch in our commission reports adds interest and understanding. But, focus on the issues as you watch the proceedings, whether those proceedings, at a given moment, take the form of quiet conversation or of lively debate. We're not talking here about whether an individual is, overall, likeable in a social setting. They are all at least likeable enough to have gotten elected.

*As chair of the meeting, a mayor can't initiate a motion and is conventionally restricted from taking an active role during debate. Unlike one of his recent predecessors, Mayor Ellison does not often insert himself into the dialogue or make speeches, although he will tip his hand sometimes by his body language, facial expression, tone of voice.

**VersagiVoice has added a tabulation of no-votes and split-votes. That tabulation, as of April 2008, seems to show that most commissioners, most times, vote on issues. Just when you've decided Commissioner X is a control-freak, he goes libertarian either intellectually or emotionally.

April 2011
They're regular people
Elected officials behave differently away from The Table
It more than occasionally happens that I will be chatting with an elected official in the hallway outside Commission Chambers. A resident comes over to greet me, gets folded into the ongoing discussion about whatever. When the official walks away, the residents asks, "Who was that guy?" I hadn't made introductions, making the frequent mistake of thinking everybody knows everybody around city hall.

In surprise, "Geez, he's a nice guy, nothing like he is at The Table."

As do most of us, elected officials sit and pray quietly in church but jump around and yell and scream at a ballgame.

I frequently point out that each elected official appropriately adopts an institutional mindset when debating public affairs. In one sense, they're really not themselves for those few hours. That's why Versagi Voice readers enjoy it when I humanize officials with impressionistic comments of praise or criticism. "Can you believe she said that . . . ?" and, "Where do you think he was coming from?" -- the kind of statements made in table conversations -- become "Three nit-picking lawyers are proving too much" when I'm chiding Rasor, Semchena, and Poulton about their asking detailed questions which don't matter to real people. Or calling Jim Ellison "too nice," which some readers consider code for "weak." when he fails to shut off the off-focus rambling, no matter who has the floor.

Further, each commission develops subsets of voting patterns which make it possible to identify elected officials without naming them. In a couple of previous commissions, it was possible to serve readers by simply referring to "the threesome" or "the foursome." In the current commission, everyone knows who are meant by "The Two." Serious watchers sense a second -- and previously unlikely -- "Two" developing.

That's so much more fun than simply reading the vote count on a list of agenda items.

How they handle criticism
For the most part local elected officials handle my criticism wisely. They ignore it.
Not in terms of ignoring valid issues, but they recognize criticism goes with the job, and most recognize that the criticism is operational, not personal. There have been fewer than a handful of elected officials who (a) consider any disagreement with their performance a personal attack -- even from a colleague at the table and (b) two individuals who, year after year, complained more about being misunderstood than all of their colleagues combined. Almost all of this discontent was not-for-publication. On-the-record disagreement, usually about facts or interpretation of facts, is always published.

Public criticism goes with the territory for public officials. Thick skin helps live with it.
An example. Decades ago, one of my local management consulting clients successfully ran for city commissioner. A year or two into his incumbency, an editorial cartoon took a snarky shot at a position he had taken re some matter -- controversial then, gone from memory now. Frankly, the cartoon crossed the line of appropriate behavior in polite society and abused the protection provided the free press by our constitution.

My client wanted to respond publicly and asked me to draft a letter-to-the-editor for his consideration. I wrote two drafts. The tone of the first reflected reasoned irritation and urged the newspaper to be a bit more careful about converting legitimate political debate into a personal vendetta. The tone of second draft was angry. It labeled the cartoon "scurrilous" and questioned not only the cartoonist's and editor's judgment but their ethics.

"Which letter would you send?, the client asked.
"Neither," I replied. "By the time your letter gets published, everybody except those of you intimately caught up in it will have forgotten the cartoon. Either letter will renew attention, not to [the original issue] but to the tiff between you and the press. Nobody wins, The public is not served."

The public was served..

Elected Officials are human

Links to CITCOM meetings