Mayor and mayor pro temp mangle City Charter during debate over whether council members have enough information to make informed decisions

(Updated to include response from a member of the Charter Review Commission)

Council member Diane Hervol had the temerity during the end of Tuesday’s three-hour and 41-minute council meeting to suggest that the regularly scheduled council meetings may not take such a long time if a pre-agenda meeting was scheduled that would allow council members to explore the topics that will be on the agenda more in-depth. (It should be noted that this council meeting did not have an executive session which have, of late, been averaging more than two hours in length.)

This suggestion was met by much moaning and groaning and changing of the subject by certain (but not all) fellow council members who complained they already have to come to City Hall two Tuesday evenings of every month and to ask them to do anything more in the service of their citizens was simply out of the question.

"I have a constitutional problem related to our charter," Mayor Pro Tem David Wilson said, "Our charter says when our meetings are going to be."

Well, yes and no, but mostly, no. All the charter says on this subject is "The council shall hold at least one regular meeting each month." But is says nothing of any particular day of the week or even time of day. It goes on to say "as many regular or special meetings may be scheduled and held as the council deems necessary to transact the business of the city."

So, sorry Wilson, but the charter doesn’t prohibit anything of the sort that Hervol is proposing; just the opposite, in fact.

But then Wilson went on about secret meetings and "smoked-filled rooms" that had absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with what Hervol was proposing.

"I want the conversations to happen right here during our charter-designated time," said Wilson, who, if he ever read the charter, would know there is no "charter-designated time."

Council member Daphne Tenorio believed Hervol’s idea was worth additional discussion in the face of Mayor Todd Webster telling her "I’m in favor of having this meeting at 4 o’clock in the morning on Sundays. How’s that?" He immediately said he was joking, but his patronizing attitude was made abundantly clear. Then he challenged Tenorio to set a day and time for the meeting when the public could attend which, of course, was not the point of Hervol’s proposal. It would seem to make sense, at least to me, to agree on a procedure before trying to establish a time for a procedure which, so far, doesn’t exist.

Hervol’s point was simply this: City Council members may have questions of staff concerning some agenda items that the staff may need time to research the answers to. Hervol said her idea was to hold a meeting the Thursday or Friday prior to the Tuesday agenda meeting so the questions could be posed then and the fully researched answers could be delivered during the regularly scheduled agenda session. She said these sessions would also be valuable in learning what questions other council members may have.

"There are times when I come into this meeting and I feel like maybe there have been questions that have been asked that maybe we’re all not privy to," Hervol said. "I want to hear what the discussions are, or if there are any discussions. I only see questions from council member (Damon) Fogley and council member Tenorio. Do the rest of you not have questions regarding the agenda before it is posted?"

"I read the material," countered council member Shane Arabie.

Hervol: "You read the material so you don’t ask staff any questions in regard to anything?"

Arabie: "Like I said I read the material beforehand."

Hervol: "So you read the material and you don’t ask staff any questions until we get here?"

Arabie: "I have the material in front of me and I spend my time before the meeting going over the material in front of me. I read the supporting documents. I read resources that go with these supporting documents. If I have a question I e-mail them.. I feel like I make good decisions based on the information I have in front of me. So I feel I have enough information at that time. That’s my opinion."

Council member Becky Selberra: "I’m not going to be sending the city manager tons of e-mails when I know he has things to follow up on. I’m not going to take his time so he can answer something I can go out there and look at. I cannot change my schedule. (To Hervol) Your schedule may be flexible, but not mine. I am not going to rush over here just because I have to be here by 5 p.m. just so that we can have a pre-agenda. No, that’s crazy. We can discuss everything just as we’re doing now."

Fogley: "I like to plan my calendar out ahead of time. I have my work schedule laid out until January and I have a pretty full calendar. I do a lot of stuff outside the city council and I just kind of think this just adds to the overall city bureaucracy. If I have to stay here until midnight, that’s fine. I come here prepared. I come here well rested ready to go knowing that we have a lot of items we need to address. Just because a school board does it doesn’t mean it’s the right thing to do for a municipality. So I am opposed to it for that reason. Also we have a lot of other people who try to make it to our meetings so asking them to come to another meeting may be difficult for them also."

Tenorio said she had asked the city manager to compile a list of questions posed by and answers sent to council members and then to send that list to all the council members because : "I just want to make sure every single council member is able to make the best decisions for the city that’s possible. If it’s just sticking them on one report and ‘here it is’ at the end of the week, then so be it."

In an attempt to correlate what Tenorio said with her original suggestion, Hervol said "For me, this is about whether the information is in front of you is not sufficient and there’s additional information a council member is requesting, that council member should have the freedom to be able to ask those questions in whatever forum is necessary for them. I just feel like there are times that there are questions being asked and I want to make sure they are all being distributed."

Webster conceded the fact that there’s absolutely nothing wrong with any council member desiring to seek additional information. But then he, too, completely misinterpreted the city charter.

"The charter specifically says how the agenda is supposed to be set," Webster said. "It specifically says the city manager sets the agenda in consultation with the mayor. It says the council members are free to put items on there but that has been limited to no more than three items per member per agenda."

And, that, dear friends, is simply not true. Everything the City Charter says about the council agenda is contained in Section 3.07, the last sentence of which reads: "The mayor or city manager shall approve meeting agendas and a council member may require any item related to city business to be placed on an agenda for which notice may be given." That’s it.

Even in section 7.01, which specifically outlines the duties of the city manager, there is no reference to the City Council’s agenda.

Now I’m not saying there’s not some ordinance or resolution tucked away somewhere that says what the mayor is claiming, but he is totally incorrect when he says this is mandated by the charter.

But he didn’t stop there. He compounded his error.

"Section 4 of the charter — it might be 4.08 or 4.05 — anyway Section 4 of the charter says if getting information, obtaining information is a problem, the charter actually anticipates this’ Webster said. "That council members might feel they weren’t getting enough information prior to the meetings, that kind of thing, it specifically says that to insure council members are obtaining the information necessary to become good council members that we’re supposed to appoint an information officer. That’s what it says in the charter."

Which is a complete and utter fabrication. There is not one word in Section 4 that comes anywhere close to what Mayor Webster is claiming and I have yet to find any other section of the charter that mentions this. I have, however, reached out to members of the Charter Review Commission, who are arguably more familiar with this document than anyone right now, to see if they know what the mayor is talking about. One member, who shall remain nameless, got back to me with this message: "If things are said frequently and with great authority, does that make them so?  I think not."

In fact, Section 4.05 of the charter, titled "Prohibitions," was intended to make sure that when council members deal with the city staff they do so only through the city manager, the city attorney, the municipal judge or the associate municipal judges.

City Manager Scott Sellers said: "Every request that I receive from a council member, I respond to all council. That has been the policy. That’s what I have done and there is a definite difference between the questions I get from one council member over another. Some I don’t get any questions from. Verbally is going to be a little different, so I would request from council that you put any clarifying question about an agenda item in an e-mail. It just makes it easier. The one thing I will say, my time makes it very difficult for me to aggregate these during the week and then send out a weekly report. That’s why I send them out as I do. It also ensures that the information is current. We try as a staff to anticipate all council questions and I think we do a fairly good job of that. We make every attempt to answer every request as quickly as possible and we’ll continue to do that. We don’t try, from a staff perspective, to withhold any information at all. But it does help to get them in writing."

Then Arabie acerbated the situation by criticizing Tenorio because she questioned a charter provision that doesn’t even exist. It was if he was lashing out at Tenorio for not agreeing with the mayor that the Martians had landed in Kyle and were working at Mama Fu’s.

Meanwhile, Hervol just sat their stunned, like Captain Phillips, possibly wondering how her suggestion that the council may want to consider holding agenda review workshop meetings got hijacked into an argument about something that’s not found in the city charter.

I asked her after the meaning if she felt the subject she had raised had been drastically changed during the course of Tuesday night’s discussion. She simply nodded. Hijackings will do that to you.