The co-publisher of the Wilco Sun has another insightful analysis concerning the operation of our City Council in the 12-18-2019 edition of the paper. The veil of secrecy that the Council operates under is astonishing.
There needs to be a mechanism put in place that provides for public input to the Council prior to an item showing up on a council agenda for a final vote.
The new state law that allows for public input at all official council meetings is perhaps a good first start. The workshop meetings held in the afternoon prior to a council meetings looks like such an opportunity for public input.
First, the Council needs to publicize this opportunity for citizen input.
Second, the Council should adopt a policy that no item discussed in a workshop will appear on a council agenda the same day. This would allow media the opportunity to publicize the issue prior to any council meeting.
Third, perhaps the workshops should be held in the evening, like council meetings, to allow working citizens the opportunity to attend and participate.
Here is the full Wilco Sun analysis on ambush votes.
"About this time last year, we Georgetown citizens saw the
light, and it was red. In three years electricity had cost $27 million more
than the city said it would cost. The budget misstatements continued into the
fourth year, and we are now around $38 million down.
Each time we electricity users pay an electric bill, we
should remember how our city officials, elected and hired, told us for years of
the wise decision they had made. Actually, they told anyone who would listen,
and this telling continued into the fourth year before it finally petered out.
The city’s original plan to get electricity from several
sources (a prudent plan of using natural gas, renewables, and possibly nuclear
power) had become an imprudent plan of single sourcing — renewables, wind and
solar.
The decision to do something that had never been done before
happened in closed meetings and even included a secret vote on the wind
contract. During this discussion there was never a time when our city
officials, elected or hired, included the collective wisdom of its citizens in
the discussion. Had citizens been included, one of two things would have
happened:
First, the high risk of going 100 percent wind and solar
would have been spotted by people with experience in the power industry. Their
knowledge could have influenced the decision, and we would most likely have
adopted a more prudent plan.
Second, had that knowledge been considered, and we chose to
go all in anyway, we wouldn’t be fussing about high bills. We would have known
and accepted the risk. We might be unhappy, but we couldn’t blame anyone but
ourselves. Our city government’s habit of secrecy has become a defacto public
policy. We have a secret decision to build a parking garage at Sixth and Main. We
have a secret decision to give Citigroup a below-cost price on electricity. We
have a secret decision to spend $4.4 million on the Costco development.
These decisions were made by ambush votes, long-planned
proposals that appear suddenly on the agenda for the next council meeting and
are voted on before they can be debated, or even understood, by the citizen.
In practice, the ambush vote is used for those proposals
that cannot stand cross-examination or debate. Perhaps it is time to amend our
City Charter to limit this secrecy which can help so few and harm so many.
We have a good model. It is the history of our U.S.
Constitution. The Constitutional Convention in 1787 proposed a constitution to
replace the Articles of Confederation. The deliberations were secret, like the
closed sessions of our council today. However, once the work was done, the
Constitution was published and the larger, public discussion, began. During
public debates, a flaw in the proposed constitution became clear. Although the
proposal set up a system of government, it did not prevent that government from
encroaching on the rights that people then enjoyed. It did not limit the powers
of government.
So we got the Bill of Rights, the first 10 amendments to our
Constitution, and today they are among the most cherished ideals of our
political life.
Our own constitution, the City Charter, should be amended to
prevent ambush votes and the secret dealings they make possible. The Charter
should limit what can be discussed in closed session, and those limits should
be more restrictive than the limits of the state law, which has been slowly
eroded by special interests."
