When the Norwalk-outers called for open debate on the council floor at last weeks special common council meeting, it prompted me to wonder why there was such concern over debate on the floor, when most of the debate about issues occurs at committee meetings.
Committee meetings, for the uninitiated, are the work sessions where relevant issues are brought up for consideration and potential action by the full council. For example, the BET committee meetings that were held drilled down to the granular issues that drove what budget line items were made of. The way committees work is basic, any committee chair or member can put something on the agenda for either study or action by the committee. The committee chair is responsible for placing action items on the council agenda at the appropriate time.
And that is the process. By the time an issue gets to the full council, the issue is ready for action, meaning that the council is to vote on either adopting or rejecting the recommendation from the committee. The testy exchanges between Matt Miklave and Peter Nolin last week, and Matt Miklave and Mike Coffey the week before all centered around what was being brought to the floor of the full council, whether it was in fact an action for the full council to vote upon or not. The rules governing the council are more stringent, requiring that anything placed on the agenda require a 24 hour notice in order to comply with the Freedom of Information act.
Procedural flaps don’t make for interesting reading though, so instead of digging into the issues about why there was contention over the “debate of the debate” both newspapers recently decided to cover the “attendance” issue. Notably, at last week’s special common council meeting, Mike Coffey, Herb Grant and Fred Bondi were not in attendance. Without getting into how things are added to the council agenda though, newspaper readers weren’t given the whole picture of what was transpiring. On Thursday, April 12th, the Finance and Claims Committee held a special meeting to discuss the budget cap. This meeting was called by chair Carvin Hilliard following the Tuesday April 10th Common Council meeting. The recommendation out of the Finance and Claims Committee was to raise the budget cap. But amazingly, the resolution coming out of that committee did not ask to do that. Prompting the the last minute confusion over amending the text of that resolution on the council floor.
So what was really going on? It looks like the Norwalk-outers screwed up getting the original resolution onto the common council agenda for the Tuesday April 10th meeting. Rather than admit to that, Matt Miklave and Kevin Poruban, both who have been on the council for many years, decided that what was needed was more theatrics. One of the really bizarre decisions they made was to not release the contents of the resolution to the press before the April 10th meeting. I asked reporters covering that meeting if they had gotten anything prior to the meeting of the 10th. One reporter mentioned that he was told that there was going to be a resolution brought to the council floor the previous week, and that he thought it was in the “council packet”, the packet being the documents supporting the actions that the council votes on.
None of the Norwalk-outers, however, provided the resolution to the press prior to the meeting, or to the public for debate, and so largely those in the audience had no idea what they were really talking about. So much for open public debate, eh? This was also true of the special council meeting on April 17th.
The other big news out of that April 10th meeting was the Norwalk-outers voting against the labor contracts with the Norwalk Municipal Employees Association (NMEA) and AFSCME local 2405. (Kevin Poruban actually abstained.) Matt Miklave made a big deal out of the “hypocrisy” of voting for union contracts that increased the wages of workers while holding the budget cap to the “arbitrary” 3.8%. The implication he was making was that the labor contracts were exceeding the 3.8% budget increase. The budget cap that the council sets is a yearly one.
Yet, according to the Norwalk Citizen-News, the NMEA contract calls for a wage increase of 3% for 2006 (retroactive) and 3.5% from July 1 2007 through July of 2008. The AFSCME contract calls for same percent increases with the addition of a 2% increase between 2008-2009. In short, the wage increases fell under the proposed guideline of overall budget cap increase recommended by the council for the current year, as well as the increase from the previous year. So it turns out that there’s not much hypocrisy there, and especially not considering that both contracts called for increasing the employee contribution towards healthcare premiums.
Part of being good government is being accessible. In my research to determine the events leading up to the April 10th meeting, and the subsequent action, I was frustrated by the city government website. Little things, like some of the names listed here http://www.norwalkct.org/comcouncilcom.htm as being members are incorrect. And when it comes to figuring out the attendance of meetings, by council members I discovered missing meeting minutes. All of this information should be up to date and posted on the website.
So, it’s reprehensible that obtaining committee meeting minutes is so difficult. No wonder why so much misinformation is out there.
But one detail did pop out, for the Finance and Claims Committee, during the period December 14th 2006 through March 8th, 2007, 8 meetings were held. Meeting minutes were missing for the January 11th meeting. Matt Miklave missed all but two meetings during that period. So in the run up to the budget, Miklave did not attend most of the committee meetings where budget issues were debated. Is it no wonder that he felt that the issues concerning the budget were not debated.
I’ve posted the attendance records going back to November for the major committees of the common council. There should be at the very least a record of when a meeting was held, even if the minutes are not available. attendence_chart.pdf
In the end, the public was not served well by this process. The BOE does not do enough to make public its budget, and the average tax payer in this town is ill served by the missing information on the city web site when it comes to the activities in committee meetings. This needs much improvement. It’s clear that this blog has provided some of that missing information, but its just as clear that all sides of an issue need to be more available.
