Hard on the heels of the Marina Redevelopment meeting, comes another very important meeting you should attend.
This meeting will be at the Police Station, not at City Hall. And it will not be recorded.
An Ad Hoc Committee is a temporary committee which meets to accomplish a single purpose. This one was appointed arbitrarily by Mayor Mahoney. It consists of Mayor Mahoney, Deputy Mayor Buxton and Councilmember Steinmetz. Together they are re-writing the City Council’s Rules of Procedure.
In the past, our rules have simply been tweaked by having CMs submit ideas, then discuss them at an open meeting, make changes and then approve an update to the existing RoP. That’s what we’ve done since 1959.
This is the first time I can see where a committee was appointed and they are re-writing the entire thing using the current RoP of Bothell as their model.
Here is my recap of that first meeting: Ad Hoc Rules of Procedure Committee Meeting #1
The first meeting was the first time either I or my colleagues were aware of this. This is not what the Council approved when it voted to begin this process on 7 July, 2022. But this is what is happening.
The first meeting introduced the concept and went through about ‘2/3 of the process’ to paraphrase both the Mayor and Deputy Mayor. The second meeting will tackle issues of ‘social media’ and ‘punishment’ and ‘sanctions’ and ‘conflict of interest’ which are not in our current RoP–and which seem to be the real meat of the desire for the complete re-write.
Even more than the Marina meeting, I urge the public to attend this.
My take
Asking the public to attend this sort of thing is asking a lot. It has nothing of personal interest. It will be super-boring. Plus, it will likely contain at least some procedural blather that will be difficult to follow. Such a deal!
But the fact that it is so poorly noticed and will not be recorded is the reason you should attend. There need to be witnesses to this sort of thing. I am not kidding.
Every update to our Rules of Procedure has had at least one change designed specifically to mess with a particular councilmember who was considered ‘problematic’. Since this is a complete re-write and not an update, expect the worst.
Because when the IRS changes the code, or the government changes some rules, they would never start with a clean sheet without years of discussion. To do so would cause a firestorm of mistrust. Completely rewriting any big ‘manual’ (which is what this is) in such a closed manner sends a very strong signal that this is more about politics than procedure.
The real problem is that whatever damage is done, makes life tougher for every councilmember who comes after. And this is the thing I’ve had difficulty convincing you of. People who read this probably care about politics. But you tend to think that the right person can fix things. WRONG. No amount of charm or cleverness overcomes rule changes like this without years of effort! So whatever you dislike about not only the Council but also Des Moines, tends to get baked in at meetings like this.
The whole point of these meetings is to prevent change. Just your presence helps.