The City Commission wants to make the decision after gathering more public input and when people can join together in the City Commission Chambers.
Mayor Whitehead spoke the longest, arguing for meetings to remain at 9 a.m., when “we are fresher” and staff doesn’t have to be paid overtime to attend evening meetings. “Can we afford it, especially at this time?”
Whitehead also seemed perturbed by allowing too much input from some constituents in particular and the public in general.
Public comment was done away with at the second meeting of the month because “It is the same group that comes to complain,” Whitehead said. “It is a handful of people. We are talking about making a drastic change for a handful of people.”
“We were elected by the people to do a job,” Whitehead said. “If the community wants to be involved, why are we here?”
“The City Commission wants an ad hoc committee [formed earlier in the meeting to allow the public to help form the City’s back-to-work policy] and has advisory boards,” Whitehead said. “What are we supposed to do?”
Public comment was also done away with to shorten meetings, Whitehead said. “Public comment takes an hour. That’s a given. The agenda takes an hour to an hour and a half. Executive session takes an hour. The City Commission sometimes stayed in the evening until 11 at night,” when meetings were held in the evening in the past.
City Commissioner Amanda Forrister and Mayor Pro-Tem Brendan Tolley said returning public comment was the biggest issue raised by residents during their campaigns for office.
“That’s why we’re bringing it up,” Forrister said.
City Commissioner Randall Aragon proposed they form an ad-hoc committee made up of more than the usual public commenters, but Tolley said they already had heard from a broad spectrum of the public through emails and phone calls, noting many people don’t want to be on a committee or go to the mic.
“We just need to get the word out” the City Commission is still collecting input, Tolley said.
The next City meeting is May 27, at 5:30 p.m., noted Aragon, who asked if the second meeting of the month had already been changed to evening. No answer was given, therefore it is unclear how the City Commission’s rules of procedure, which governs how meetings are conducted, were bent to accommodate the new time before they were amended.
The discussion glossed over the time change, yet City Commissioners agreed to continue with the current rules of procedure until the public can rejoin meetings physically.
But the online meetings, even with bad audio, have made inroads in correcting the City’s transparency problems.
Whitehead noted nine people were attending the May 13 meeting via gotomeeting.com, the service the City is using to allow public access online during the crisis, a goodly number for City meetings.
Several public comments were given via the chat function that comes with the online-meeting service. Comments were made as the meeting progressed through various agenda items, giving the public real-time access to their elected officials and the governing process. The chat comments will be preserved as part of the public record, according to City Clerk Angela Torres, who answered several questions from the audience via the same chat function.
Online attendance will continue, but not in the same format.
City Manager Morris Madrid indicated the City is purchasing new cameras for Commission Chambers with superior audio, “so people can watch on YouTube or Facebook. They can’t comment, but they can attend.” He said the installation should be complete by July.