The City is making good on a proposal I made at our June 20th City Council Meeting to publish the video of Committee Meetings. The first batch are now available on the Des Moines Councilmember Youtube Channel. Go get ’em!
Thanks to Councilmember Martinelli and Deputy Mayor Mahoney for supporting the idea. And of course, thanks to our IT staff, Dale Southwick and our City Clerk Bonnie Wilkins for making it happen! This has been a long time coming. I’ve been trying to educate the public about the importance of Committees since forever.
What’s so special about Committees?
People who attend full City Council Meetings often comment that they seem somewhat ‘pre-decided’. They’re not wrong, but that in itself is not necessarily a bad thing. It’s at the Committees are where most policy actually happens. The members are expected to know more about their specific area than the rest of the Council. Each committee receives more detailed briefings and the discussions are far more specific. So when an item comes to the Council from one of the five committees, it should sail through nine times out of ten. If items referred from a committee were routinely being argued over it would indicate that the full Council did not have confidence in the referring committee.
Unfortunately, just between us, Committee Meeting Agendas and Minutes are often not exactly… how do I put this delicately? Detailed. For example, here is the Agenda for the June 20 Public Safety Committee Meeting. This is where the PSEM discussed Body Cameras in detail. The description is… blank. Absolutely no detail. At the next full Council Meeting, the Council voted 6-1 for the proposal. I was the lone vote against it and I struggled to explain my vote to residents (who were mostly in favour of the idea in the broad strokes) because until now, the public could not see what I saw.
This is where you come in…
The public has an interest in showing up to committees to engage on issues that are of specific concern to you. If there is an item relevant to your neighbourhood, you want to be at those Committee discussions and presentations and make sure that your voice is heard before it gets to the full Council. Because, again, by the time a referred item gets to the full Council, the CMs consider it ‘pre-vetted’. So, if you show up to a full Council meeting upset about an issue that has already been approved by one or more Committees, you’re asking the full Council to vote against their colleagues who usually know more about the issue than they do. Awkward. 😀
Unfortunately, you’re super-busy and Committee Meetings are at the super-inconvenient time of 3PM in the afternoon. So without the video, you could never really know what was going on. Now you can.
There’s always room for improvement…
OK so, how do you know when there are ‘items relevant to your neighbourhood’? Still working on that. 😀 Improving transparency and public engagement were among my primary bitches … er,,, ‘goals’ 😀 in wanting to join the City Council in the first place. It’s an ongoing process, but I want to acknowledge that this is a step in the right direction.
Another one of my ‘asks’ has been to add a Calendar on the City web site that will allow you to be automatically notified of meetings and other events. That’s coming soon, too!
Can we do even better? You bet. We could refine that notification system to alert you not just when a meeting occurs, but when it contains items that might be of interest to you. (Eg. based on your location or a school or a particular program.) We can provide public comment at Committee Meetings. (And on a side note, we could also enhance the system to notify you of emergencies like the recent beach closure. 🙂 )
There are a lot of things we can do, not just to make the system more ‘transparent’ but also to make it more relevant to you–which will hopefully get more of you to engage in public life–advocating for issues, volunteering 🙂
No drama…
Now, a word about politics. For a small portion of the public, there is this notion of a ‘lack of civility’ on our City Council. That is actually quite true–but not in the way people think and I’ll talk about that another time. The point is: I want people to watch these committee meetings not just to learn about issues, but also to see how drama-free things go when the discussion sticks to policy. There is (almost) never any of the ‘cringey’ stuff that people make so much hay about when watching full Council meetings. You can see how things could work and should work on the full Council.
Why? I think the reasons things are calmer at Committee Meetings boil down to:
- The tasks are specific. So there’s no room for extraneous posturing or no speechifying.
- But ironically, there are also no limits (eg. the dreaded ‘2X rule’). It’s more of a conversation with staff. (And honestly? That’s how full Council Meetings used to be.)
- The goals are all short term and obvious. There are rarely any big strategic decisions or new policy ideas. In other words, although the meetings are supposed to be ‘Council’, they are actually Staff meetings where they discuss their agenda. We agree on mostly everything because the current meeting configuration does not support doing anything we might disagree about.
Anyhoo, if you’ve heard about all the ‘conflict’ on the Council, the thing you will notice is that when it comes to the actual policy, things run smoothly and there actually is cooperation that you can feel good about as a resident.
It ain’t Netflix…
As of today, only six videos are published and unless I’m mistaken there are at least fifty more coming from the past year. I’m not suggesting you start plowing through all of these like Netflix. They’re not that compelling. 😀 But now that we’re starting, I hope to provide some ‘highlights’ on items where I think the discussion went beyond the presentations I attach to each Weekly Update. And somehow I hope we can connect the videos and the agendas and presentations in Search so you can see everything about an issue at a glance.
A practical example…
Back to that PSEM discussion on Body Cameras. Here is the Video 06/03/2021. Again, here is the Agenda, with absolutely no detail. The full Council voted 6-1 for the proposal.
I voted against it because the Committee approved the plan without answers to some basic questions like “When can the officer turn the camera on and off?” I had hoped that in the interim period, the administration would flesh out ‘details’ like that. But it came to the full Council with the same questions left unanswered. And I won’t vote for anything that leaves basic questions like that unanswered.
Now that you have the video, you can see what I saw and decide for yourself whether or not I made the right call.