Enforcing rules that make no sense that they don’t know anyway. Thanks to Mayor Henrietta Davis, there’s been more focus on enforcing Robert’s Rules of Order in the past months. Or Davis’ Rules of Order. Or David Maher’s, or whoever’s happens to be speaking at the time. In general, councillors are always happy when they get to use their esoteric knowledge of decorum and diplomacy to rule how a meeting is run, even when it turns out they’re making up the rules. It’s especially striking when the rules they cite hurt more than they help, or just make no sense.
The council’s “roundtable” meetings can’t be televised by city-owned cameras, for instance, because a majority of councillors think they’re able to speak more freely when city-owned cameras aren’t watching them – even though roundtables are attended by citizens, recorded and written about and can be livestreamed over the Internet for free (and two roundtables recently were, just to make the point). Yet after voting April 9, 2012, to hold the no-city-cameras rule sacred, Maher tried in March to televise a roundtable simply because at a previous meeting “I made a commitment.” Never mind that this is a tacit admission of the pointlessness of the rule; the solution to fulfilling Maher’s accidental, one-off commitment to transparency was to change the name of a roundtable so it was called something else. Certainly if it looks like a duck, swims like a duck and quacks like a duck, it probably is a duck, but in this case the duck was renamed “working group of the Ordinance Committee.”
Davis has been enforcing the rules of public comment with a clunky, distracting and intrusive insistence, but she took her approach up a notch in March by literally making one up: that even though a matter appears on the agenda, members of the public aren’t allowed to talk about it unless there’s extensive conversation about it later. Note that there’s no way for a member of the public (or, for that matter, a member of the City Council) to know whether an item will be chosen for conversation.
If Davis was really concerned about the time taken up by public comment on especially hot-button issues, and her repeated warnings about time limits suggest she is, she and the council could take note of what worries members of the public the most week by week and suspend rules to address an issue upfront before person after person stands and burns through their allotted time expressing fears and anger about something that will be a non-issue. The most recent examples of this concerned the schools budget, which some alarmist officials and residents portrayed as being “voted down” instead of being simply on the way toward a vote, and a School Committee meeting run by the mayor where parents and faculty panicked over “dramatic” changes coming to certain schools. At the end of lengthy public comment, committee member Fred Fantini simply told the crowd there was no need to worry. It’s a step that could be taken in response to the first speaker sounding a theme, or even before public comment but in response to e-mail or phone calls received by city officials or their aides. Councillors talk often about how the city can communicate better with its residents, but they don’t seem to know they can do it too.
This also could have been done in July, when Davis bumped a vote by a week without explanation – then was forced to answer when citizens occupied the public comment lectern and refused to leave until she gave an answer. City officials cognizant enough of public unrest to literally call in a police officer should also know enough to communicate what’s happening and defuse the situation.
“We have a process here. If we change [the rules] for bad behavior, we’re simply going to be in pandemonium,” councillor Ken Reeves said.
The pandemonium already happened, though, and in fact councillors change the rules all the time, whenever they find it convenient.
At the March 7 meeting of the Ordinance Committee, for instance, Davis called for a vote before any public comment had been heard, explaining that she had to leave early (and at which “members of the public hissed audibly,” Erin Baldassari noted in the Cambridge Chronicle). That shortcut to a vote and around the rules, brought on for the mayor’s convenience, is why Maher promised to flout the rules and his own vote to televise the next roundtable. No surprise, then, that Davis suddenly saw that “we’ve found a place where the rules need to be changed.”
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Excellent article. I hope voters consider all these issues in November.