Sun Editorial on Ambush Votes

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."