Council’s approach violates city charter, and public should be heard
To the City Council:
The city charter says
Except in the cases of executive sessions authorized by section twenty-three A of chapter thirty-nine, all meetings of the city council shall be open to the press and to the public, and the rules of the city council shall provide that citizens and employees of the city shall have a reasonable opportunity to be heard at any such meeting in regard to any matter considered thereat.
It appears sometime in the past, someone crafted an interpretation of these words which would allow the City Council to meet and not give citizens “a reasonable opportunity to be heard at any such meeting in regard to any matter considered thereat.” I’m sure it may have been for some good reason along the lines of, “We, the City Council, need to be able to meet and discuss matters before us without devoting the whole meeting to listening to the public talk about matters before us.”
Thus the “roundtable” meeting was born. I think it was illegal then and I think it is illegal now.
The City Council Rules were voted without (much) debate at the beginning of your term, and reflect the wishes of some long-gone previous incarnation of the City Council. The rules are broken, in multiple senses of the phrase. The rules are ignored when they get in the way. The rules are invoked inconsistently to stifle debate. The rules are also broken if they actually keep you from doing your job.
I know you all and I know you are capable of having a discussion among yourselves and giving the public “a reasonable opportunity to be heard at any such meeting in regard to any matter considered thereat.” It’s your meeting and you control it, not some long-gone previous incarnation of the City Council, not the city manager, not the city solicitor and not the public.
The city charter gives you that power. All it asks in return is that you do what it says. I recognize that my charter right must be invoked reasonably and I want you to devote as much time as you can to discussing this among yourselves in whatever way you find most useful. Even if the charter didn’t require it, you should open all your meetings (and subcommittee meetings) to whatever form of public communication (speech, TV, Internet, letters, emails, etc., etc.) is reasonably available and you should give the public a reasonable amount of time to be heard (literally).
I ask that you get a fresh start, and embrace the spirit of the Charter’s words this Friday at 9:30 a.m. Find a way to hear the public while having a (real) discussion among yourselves and city staff about this important matter before you, the MIT PUD-5 Zoning Amendment.
Tom Stohlman, Channing Street
I support Tom Stohlman’s call for finding “a way to hear the public” at the Friday, March 22, meeting of the Ordinance Committee.
The City’s own listing of meetings describes Friday’s meeting as : “The Ordinance Committee will conduct a roundtable/working session on issues relating to the zoning petition filed by MIT-PUD-5. No public comment. No votes will be taken. The Ordinance Committee roundtable/working session to be televised. (Sullivan Chamber) ”
It would seem all that is necessary is to suspend the rules to allow for public comment as the last item on the agenda.
Any claims that the Friday meeting is “not a meeting of the Council” or that the Councillors will not be engaged in “any matter considered” — as required by the City Charter — are without any legal, logical or reasonable foundation.
Stephen Kaiser, Hamilton Street
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Steve – the legal, logical and reasonable truth of the matter is that the City Council changed this on Monday to a Roundtable meeting of the City Council. It’s no longer an Ordinance Committee meeting. The Roundtable rules apply and that includes no TV and no public comment.
They could, of course, suspend the rules at the meeting to allow some public comment, but after Monday night’s discussion on the matter I would say that is a most unlikely outcome.
Robert-
The legal truth is the plain words of the Charter. For those of you who care, go to Roberts’s site for our long discussion of those words.
The logical truth is hard to follow, on Friday the full City Council convened, “recessed” to a “special roundtable meeting” which was run entirely by David Maher, the chair of the Ordinance Committee. When the “roundtable” was done, the City Council Meeting reconvened, and voted to adjourn.
Somehow this recess gave them special powers to have an open City Council meeting as defined by State Law and avoid having an open City Council meeting as defined by the Cambridge Municipal Charter. The logical truth escapes me.
The reasonable truth is that the Council could convene a meeting, allow the public to be heard, and discuss the matter just as they did without resorting to these procedural somersaults.
Cambridge is unique among all other Massachusetts cities and towns in that the Charter requires the public be heard on matters being considered at a meeting of the City Council. And even though they don’t have to by State Law, hundreds of elected public bodies do this every day, across the Commonwealth.
Why can’t we?
Tom,
I agree with your logic and legal interpretation, but there is also an argument that some changes or corrections in government must be gradual. One may see situations where the leap from non-compliance with the law to full compliance with the law cannot be made instantly. There are occasions when the shift must be done gradually.
I had a sense about this at Friday morning’s “roundtable/working meeting.” The entire focus was on MIT zoning — a decision now before both the Council and the Ordinance Committee. The meeting went for three and a half hours with no time consumed by MIT presentations and none for public comment. The “working meeting” appears to be an entirely new invention, unless there is some sort of explanation for it.
Yet I was sympathetic with the plight of the Council and what it achieved. For the first time, the Council heard an informative explanation by an experienced architect about the mixed role of developers with their biases for certain types of architecture and land uses, for better or for worse. Usually architects ventilate only on the alleged benefits of specific projects. This was an unusual presentation made possible only by the invented format of the meeting.
The Councillors needed a format to talk and most of them did. But one member (who I do not usually agree with) gave a summary of the essential agony of the Council’s position. Ken Reeves pointed out how the planning process was flawed and how we do not have a document we can call a plan. Here is the Council trying to deal with very complicated zoning, and they do not have a plan.
Preparation of the plan should always precede the submission of a zoning petition. For the better part of the past two decades, including city-wide rezoning, we have been scheduling zoning first, and planning second — if at all. The explanation of the architect, the design of the street level, and a host of other matters discussed last Friday were planning issues, not zoning. Ideally, one should use zoning to bring about a legal definition of allows structures and uses — based on a plan. The Council was trying to do this without a plan.
It matters little who the individual Councillors are. They are all placed in this virtually impossibly awkward situation. They do not have a housing plan or a street design plan. They do not have a traffic plan, a transit plan, an historic preservation plan, a shadow plan, or a description of alternatives for how MIT should balance its academic and non-academic interests.
They do have a huge MIT model that we saw on Saturday. It quite useful, but it is not zoning.
There is a huge hole in the planning process. We have a Planning Board with explicit responsibilities for zoning action, but vague responsibilities for planning or planning review. For Kendall, the City was presented with two separate plans, one by Goody-Clancy and another by CBT. How does the process make the comparison … and combine the best features into one plan? It was not done.
MIT, at great expense, could have jumped in and prepared all the planning elements that the City process did not produce. But they did not. A simple example : MIT never produced a traffic report, which they should have done no matter what.
So on Friday I ended up watching all these difficulties playing out, and feeling something had to give. Would I voluntarily surrender my right to make a public comment, so that the Council could come to a better understanding of their fundamental quandary — without any distraction from me?
For this one time, my answer was yes. The Council may want to do another roundtable on MIT and will have a similar format for a C2 discussion on March 27. My reaction is that both meetings should be used to discuss the planning failures and come to an understanding amongst themselves. The meetings will probably last three hours or more without public comment.
Then, I say, that is the end of it. No more meetings without public comment. No more invented meeting formats. Never again.
Please note that I am not agreeing with the Winters rationale. We simply end up standing at the same place for a brief time.
Steve Kaiser
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