Who’s afraid of transparency and efficiency? Take a guess…

Improved transparency and efficiency in local government are among those things that we can all agree on, right? Not so fast…

Among other issues at the City, the increasingly insufferable lengths that some council meetings go to is, quite frankly, absurd. Hours-long sessions featuring public comment phases that reduce the proceedings to redundant and tedious political theater, are not what most people would consider conducive to the effective workings of good government, especially when several of the most time-consuming items on the agenda are slipped in last minute on the agreement of only two council members.

To address this, during the February 3rd City Council meeting, Councilmember Craig Kim introduced a simple, common-sense motion to propose a change to council policy that would simply require that the council meeting agenda be discussed and finalized by the ENTIRE council at a study session 30 days prior to the council meeting. The idea, Kim explained, was to help streamline the meetings, and to get the input of every member of the City Council, in coordination with the City Manager, as to the agenda of the upcoming meeting, well in advance. Easy, right?

Judging by the level of indignation expressed by Mayor Douglas, Mayor Pro-Tem Noble, and council members Douglas and Chacon at Kim’s motion, you would have thought that he had proposed to repeal the City Charter and the Magna Carta. All of them piped up to deride the proposal, insisting that everything was working just fine, and how dare he question the wisdom and authority of the Mayor and Mayor Pro-Tem?

Councilmember Madera spoke up in support of the motion, echoing Kim’s points about transparency, efficiency, and improving the process to include the input of the entire council. When he mentioned that the proposed improvements would also prevent last-minute additions to the agenda via “council business,” Noble launched into a scornful accusation that included hurling an accusation that the City Manager had somehow put the council members up to this heinous act of transparency. Despite calls from both Madera and Councilmember Dukes for the spurious accusation against the City Manager to be addressed by the Mayor or Mayor Pro Tem, it never was.

In one rather revealing exchange, Mayor Douglas, in making his comments on the proposed motion, essentially had a temper tantrum, saying to Kim, “so, what you're proposing is taking me out of the picture…” So basically, what the Mayor was saying was that he sees efforts at improving council transparency as a personal challenge to him. Apparently the Mayor considers the workings of City government as little more than an ongoing turf battle between himself and the City Manager.

Commerce City Council is an elected 9-member policy making body. The City Manager’s duty and responsibility is to bring important issues before that council. Decisions on what should be on the agenda for council meetings, where as a body they deal with those issues, ought to be done in the public vies, and with the input of all 9 members. It is as simple as that, and that is what Kim’s motion called for.

Interestingly, Mayor Pro Tem Noble, in the midst of her ranting against the motion, abruptly changed her mind, saying, somewhat passive-aggressively, that “I've changed my mind. I'm going to vote for this because I want you all to have a say. I want you all to jump in because I think that that will be a really fascinating experience to watch all nine of us participate in development of the agenda. I think that's probably a really interesting idea and thank you very much Councilmember Kim for bringing it up because you have just won me over.”

Her tone carried more than a hint of sarcasm. Given that, and her vehement opposition to the idea just moments prior to her epiphany, we wonder again at the motivation for her vote – was she persuaded that transparency is good city policy, or was the vote a  passive-aggressive reaction, hoping to set up an “I told you so” moment?

We may never know. In any case, the vote in favor of City Council transparency passed on a vote of 6-3, with Mayor Douglas, and Council Members Chacon and Douglas voting “no.”