Tonight’s council meeting — quick and inconclusive

Boy, did I underestimate the alacrity of our City Council. Last week I wrote of this pending get- together that it "should last, oh, I don’t know, all of 10 minutes at the most." Try one-fifth that time. The five council members who attended (Becky Selbera and Daphne Tenorio didn’t) took less than two minutes to dispense with the city’s business this evening. Less than two minutes — from the call to order to adjournment. Roll call. Citizens comments period. The dispensing of three agenda items. All accomplished in under two minutes. I mean when these fellas want to get it done and get out of there, they get it done and get out of there.

I also wrote last week I had questions about one of the three items on tonight’s agenda — the $141,826.03 change order for construction on Lehman Road at the Goforth intersection. I was hoping the council would clarify the source of that money. But, no. Wham! Bam! Two minutes! We’re done! No explanations necessary.

So I decided to ask City Engineer Leon Barba about it after the council adjourned. I told him I was under the impression the money was simply being shifted from the amount the city was paying the contractor working on the Lehman Road part of the road bonds project over to the contractor working on the Goforth Road project since that latter one is just about finished and the Lehman deal hasn’t really even begun. And the city desperately wanted to get this intersection completed before classes resumed at Lehman High School which, of course, is located right at that intersection.

However, just as I grossly underestimated the speed at which the council dispensed with business this evening, so was I wrong — OK, partially wrong — about the source of this $41,826.03. Barba told me that part of the money is coming from the Lehman budget, but another part of it is new money. Now, presumably, since this falls under the auspices of the 2013 bond proposal that was approved by voters, by "new money" he meant some so-far unencumbered proceeds from the sale of those bonds the voters told the city to sell to pay for this construction. The way I understand it, it’s illegal to use any other money for a voter-approved bond project other than funds derived from the sale of the bonds the voters approved.

But when I asked Barba exactly how much was coming from the Lehman account and how much of this was "new money," he flipped through several pages of his notebooks, looked at the same ledger I examined when I wrote my story last week and came to the same conclusion I did after examining that ledger: "I don’t know," he said. "I don’t seem to have those figures with me." Then he gave me the familiar City Hall Shuffle — "Let me find out and I’ll get back to you."

Here’s the real bottom line. I really think the City Council members could have stretched their meeting out to, say, three minutes at the most, to ask the same question and possibly gets an answer of one sort or another on the record, even if it was the same answer Barba gave me.

Speed kills. In this instance, the victim was clarity.