Bloggin’ on the Edge

Posted by Scott Spielman at 7:03 PM | Comments (2)

Among the issues on the agenda for the Wayne City Council meeting tomorrow night is the actual issue of the agenda.

You’ll have to take my word for it, because it’s not posted on the web site, like the Wayne 20/20 Committee wanted.

Instead, there’s a memo from Assistant City Manager Bob English, whose friend, Ron Baker, is being paid to keep the web site fresh, about how the city does not have the necessary staff or resources to provide all of the back up documentation that would go along with the agenda.

A little further down is something more troubling: “As you know, it has been the long-standing practice of the city that the council packets are not released to the public until Monday morning. The reason for this is because it is the city council’s discretion to review the proposed agenda that the city manager has put together over the weekend and approve the agenda,” English writes. “If they desire, they could ask that an agenda item be removed or deferred until a future date.”

This seems like a violation—in spirit, if nothing else—of the Open Meetings Act. How can the council approve an agenda if they don’t have a meeting to approve the agenda? And when and where would such a meeting be posted? I’ve never seen a posting for it. If they want to take something off the agenda, they can do it at the meeting. You simply: move to table it, move to postpone it or move to have it taken off the agenda. Then you approve the agenda, as amended, at the start of the meeting. That’s how it happens everywhere else.

This is a simple and silly issue that quite frankly boggles my mind. In any other place I’ve been, they’d be looking for a way to make this kind of easy request happen. In Wayne, it seems like they’re looking for reasons why it can’t be done and it always comes back to one of two things: we’ve always done it this way, or we don’t have the money for it.

It’s strange how the council has no problem approving a $3,000 raise for the city manager—who was already making $121,000 a year in straight salary, alone—but they can’t justify the alleged cost of making the government more open, accessible and responsive.

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