City Council candidates should attend meetings before Inauguration Day
To Diane, Janice, Kimberly, Minka and all other City Council wannabes: Do you expect voters to take you seriously if you’re not attending City Council meetings? I sure won’t.
Your new quartet of freshman councillors all had something in common: They stayed clear of City Hall until Inauguration Day. The four raised and spent a couple hundred thousand dollars filling your mailboxes with their pretty faces and putting up signs asking for No. 1 votes, but couldn’t waste Monday evenings learning what the job is really all about.
Once elected, the newbies put on an embarrassing display of their ignorance of council procedures as simple as roll call voting. None would have passed a quiz on the last session’s agenda.
Meeting absences by seated councillors are already frequent and chronic. Hang out yourself and you’ll find that showing up on time, if at all, isn’t the highest priority of your well-compensated long-timers. It’s not a lot to ask.
If you can trick a candidate with a simple question about what the City Council did last week, think about voting for someone else.
Agreed! Thanks for your letter, Gary. We haven’t met, but I do attend regular City Council meetings (and as many committee meetings as possible). I may even have a better attendance record than some sitting Councillors, having attended most meetings since last September.
I agree that it is important for those running to understand meeting procedure. I find it even more important for them to understand the requirements of the job. Certainly, by merely observing the behavior, proposed orders, and votes of incumbents in meetings, you won’t get a clear understanding of what the Plan E Charter expects, and the people of Cambridge should expect, from our Councillors.
Council meetings are televised and recorded for viewing on demand; being physically present in the Sullivan Chamber every Monday night isn’t required until one is elected. Unfortunately most other meetings are not. I will be at City Hall for this afternoon’s housing committee meeting on setting a new nexus fee to fund affordable housing. If elected, I intend to make serving on the council my full time job. And for the record, my full given name is spelled “Janis” but I go by “Jan.”
Jan Devereux
Hey there Gary,
So, who is Diane? And I will tell you that I do see Kim, Jan, and Minka at all sorts of civic and community events. The first two are often in the Sullivan Chamber on Monday nights. I’ll also say that at least three of the four newest Councillors were no strangers at civic and community happenings. I agree with your basic idea here, but I’m just sayin’ maybe you could use more eyes and ears.