Video and Transcript

I captured a cell phone recording and uploaded to Youtube to create a machine generated transcript. Click the ‘CC’ button to vieew the transcript. Or you can read it in full here.

Highlights?

All items with an asterisk (*) are not legally enforceable. Eg. the Council can show their displeasure, but they cannot make CMs recuse themselves from a vote. In my mind, any ‘rule’ that cannot be enforced should not be a ‘rule’.

The Ad Hoc Rules Committee had its second meeting today at the Police Station. Here is a recap of the first meeting. It was almost three hours long and once again, not recorded. One resident showed up–and they deserve a medal for doing so. I just happened to be sitting next to the above poster. God really does have a sense of humour, right? 😀

1. 1. The Committee seems to favour removing Rule 26a, which is the one which requires two readings to pass an ordinance. This change will allow the Council to pass an ordinance the same night unless the majority agrees to a second reading.
   2. They proposed changes to Conflict of Interest:
      • A councilmember could still be involved with any non-profit that works with the City, perhaps even be a board member. They just can’t be an ‘officer’.
      • *A majority vote of the Council could be invoke to pressure a councilmember to recuse themself from a vote, if they perceive a potential conflict.
      • There was no discussion of preventing electeds from leaving office and immediately going to work for the City as a consultant…
      • Or, oh I dunno, going to work at the Port of Seattle eight months after leaving office.
   3. *There was agreement that all councilmembers must submit a performance evaluation of the City Manager. The rationale: because if councilmembers opt out, it might lower his performance score and thus prevent his receiving a scheduled raise.
   4. There was a big discussion about ‘public shaming of staff’. The statement was this: Criticising the action of any employee in public is grounds for sanction.
   5. There was a lengthy discussion over handling Council appointments.
      • *The committee came down on leaving it to each Council to establish its own rules case by case.
      • *However, they agreed to add a rule that all applicants must submit a financial statement.

All this simply codifies what we’re doing now and is terrible.

• There was a lengthy discussion over the role of the Councilmember. It was decided to make it clear that there can be no direct contact with staff. All communication with staff must go through the City Manager. This simply codifies what we’re doing now and is terrible.
• There was agreement that all standing committees should be recorded. but not others. This simply codifies what we’re doing now and is terrible. (Note that there is no rule as to how long recordings should be retained.)
• There was a discussion of somehow improving the City Manager’s report. And providing a general calendar. (I would remind my colleagues that there is already this thing called the Future Agendas Report on-line.) CM Steinmetz proposed adding a ‘dashboard’ to the City web site to show indicators of ‘how the city is doing’. Mayor Mahoney and CM Steinmetz agreed to work that out in private. The current Quarterly Financial Reports were considered fine, although what the City presents are only snippets and not true financial statements, but whatehvs, right?
• There was talk about “you get one phone call”, which means the current rule limiting CMs to one remote meeting a year. That will be increased. TBD?
• Deputy Mayor Buxton asked for Committee Reports be split out from CM comments and put at the beginning of our meetings–which we did until about 2017-ish? The idea is that a CM would report on their activities at the start of the meeting so that the Council could take action. I support this.
  • Although I do not support the fact that no one bothers to actually report the minutes of the events they attend either to the Council or to the meeting Minutes as we’re supposed to. What the Deputy Mayor does is say, “I attended 33 meetings this month. Call me, if you have any questions!” That’s not how public meetings are supposed to work. If you’re the City’s representative for an organisation? Put the work product in the packet so the public (including people in the future) can read it.
  • Each advisory group is supposed to keep minutes and for councilmembers to provide updates to the Counc and to the public. I have never seen such a report from any of the groups we liaise with–unless I attended their meetings.
• CM Steinmetz proposed establishing a dress code (business casual) and disallowing any head gear. This was greeting with great enthusiasm.

My take

To my mind, the overall focus of the re-write is image. Improving the public perception of the Council. I have heard this argument stated exactly like this for years, “When the City promotes a positive image, it attracts investment.” Therefore, a primary duty of the City Council is to make the City look good; and conversely, to avoid any public embarrassment.

I can sum up most of my feelings about this with the following ironies.

• • The committee spent about twenty minutes discussing the importance of not “shaming staff in public.” The example was “What if a councilmember storms into the city offices to yell at an employee?” And I wanted to remind my colleagues that since my election the entire office has CARD KEY ACCESS. In theory, no councilmember should be able to get in without being buzzed in.
  • The group also spent a great deal of time emphasising the importance of no direct contact with staff. But at several points, each member of the committee used these words. “OK, I’ll call Tim tomorrow to get an answer on (x).” Tim, being our City Attorney and a member of staff–one of the people one is not supposed to contact directly.

I can hear both my children’s voices from twenty years ago. “How come it’s OK when you do it? DAD!” 😀

Rule 26a

There was the lengthy discussion of Rule 26a. Currently, Rule 26 says that all ordinances require two readings for passage. But there is a little (a) which specifies that the Council can override that and vote to pass the ordinance in one reading. Staff loves that, because they like to get things done. So much so that they have taken to including a ‘Rule 26a’ motion in every Agenda Item–to encourage the Council to pass things in one night. I almost always vote ‘NO’ for one simple reason:

The public usually only finds out about these items after the first reading. It angers them greatly. to learn that items have been passed in one night that they were unaware of. Allowing a second reading does not slow down meetings. It simply moves the item to the next meeting for a vote. If the public shows up at the second meeting? Great. Let’s hear them. If not, we added at most three minutes to the flow.

Steinmetz, Buxton and Mahoney all said clearly they want to eliminate the need for a second reading because when we vote to override the second reading it makes us look like “we’re hiding something.” Which is totally true.

They want to get rid of a second reading entirely so that the public won’t know there are issues of potential concern. Rather than improve transparency, the idea is to avoid telling people things that may cause controversy. Again: it’s all about image.

Their response: “A Councilmember could ask for a second reading.” Sure. And get voted down six to one. 😀 The idea is to shift the ‘image problem’ to those ²‘nattering nabobs of negativity’.

We’re totally hiding things.

The Scarlet Letter

And one other thing: Again, all those items with asterisks (*) are unenforceable.

Under State law, the Council majority cannot remove a colleague; that is (wisely) left to the voters. All it can do is refuse to cooperate. Which is the case now.

Any rule that is unenforceable has no place in any ‘rules of procedure’ for the simple reason that an unenforceable rule is no rule. It’s simply a tool of public shaming and an excuse to defy the will of the voters.

Above all things, a Council should accept one another, not try to change one another. Cooperation should be the watchword, not conformity.

I believe in democracy. Seriously. And I have to assume that voters knew what they were getting. If someone is elected who looks, thinks and speaks differently from the majority? That is who the voters chose. The voters expect us to work together, not regardless of our differences, but because of them!

If fellow electeds attempt to get their colleagues to conform to their ideas of ‘public image’, you’ve crossed a Rubicon from which there is no chance of recovery. So why even go there?

Perhaps ‘shunning’ was an effective tool of behaviour mod in the 17th Century, but I recall my kids having to read The Scarlet Letter back in high school and I don’t think it worked out super great even then.

Regardless, it doesn’t work today. Far from shaming the elected into being a good boy or girl, it simply fuels a permanent state of contempt.

Forgiveness, compromise, acceptance, and empathy, on the other hand, require no staff time to prepare, no public money, and ¹nine out of ten dentists recommend them for prompt relief in contentious work environments. 🙂

Background

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 find where a committee was appointed to do this. And this Ad Hoc Committee is re-writing the entire thing using the current RoP of the City 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.

¹Or that may have been Trident® Sugarless Chewing Gum.

²A quote from former Vice President Spiro Agnew. A totally corrupt, ultra-conservative guy with one of the greatest speechwriters in American history.

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.

Intro

Fair warning: All is true, but I walked into this with a chip on my shoulder. Because:

• The meeting was held with the bare minimum 24 hours legal notice.
• At a non-standard location (Police Station)
• Was not recorded.
• Did not show up on my City Calendar like other committee meetings.
• There was nothing on the web except one tiny marker on the City web site.
• And even little details like wi-fi were challenging.

The notice on the door indicated that there might be a ‘quorum’.  Four people showed up, all from Redondo, including Councilmember Achziger. I assume they found out about it from either he or moi.

Back in time…

When the Council voted for some form of update to our Rules back in July, Deputy Mayor gave a presentation. I asked for a one-sheet specific task list. Because when we leave things open-ended (and we always leave things that open-ended) something bad always happens. It’s designed that way.

Buxton: My view of an ad hoc committee is administrative in mostly administrative like to gather information organize it and for me put everybody's input into a draft...

Mahoney: I would i would just say that this is the purpose of this is administrative, to get us ready to have that meeting in a constructive format where everybody's had input. So essentially the meetings that would occur in November and December would attend. It would essentially achieve that everybody's input would be there but it would be formatted and ready for the discussion any any subsequent meetings before that...

Harris: Having done this for a little while now and been kind of been a sap, I am going to recommend to my colleagues that the deputy mayor prepare a written proposal with a specific process bring it back at the next meeting and then we amend it and pass that. We've had this history of doing this kind of ad hoc, from the dais, sloppy business. And one person's understanding is this or that. You want a piece of paper. One page...

Pennington: I don't know that any one of us have that kind of expertise or time...

Harris: I made the motion because i have every confidence in the deputy mayor's ability to prepare a parliamentary procedure that is accurate and would be for the good of the council. And on one page.

That motion failed 2-5. No one spoke on my behalf.

The funny thing is that if you look at the Agenda, we were given two options to vote on, a ‘tweak’ or ‘complete re-write’. We never even voted on that. We just voted for… er… ‘something’.

All I took away from the above was that ‘we’ had decided to hire a consultant who would interview each of us as to our needs, wants desires. The consultant would compile those together, then submit a report. And then the committee would convene, discuss those ideas, and submit a draft to the full Council for debate.

As I said, I’ve been through this before. And yeah, that’s not what happened.

On the plus side, apparently, we have hired a consultant, Ann McFarlane of Jurassic Parliament, with whom I have taken several classes on various aspects of parliamentary procedure. I’ve also posted articles of hers here many times.

On the minus side, the committee (of which Deputy Mayor Buxton was named chair) showed up to the meeting having already developed a draft proposal, but before gathering that individual input. So whatever concerns CM Pennington may have had regarding anyone’s lack of time or organisational skills seem to have been misplaced.

In fact, during the meeting they were very pleased with their progress, seeming to have gone through about reviewing two thirds of that first draft.

You can stop right there.

In my opinion, that right there is, unethical and shows such bad faith as to be considered corruption. And if it had been recorded, I would’ve just walked out. There wasn’t even the pretense as to good faith.

Let’s start over…

Again, this is not a series of tweaks. It is a full re-write being done by the committee before it is even seen by the rest of the Council or the consultant and that is not what the Council discussed or voted on.

Over our history, our Rules of Procedure have slowly evolved from a standard template of language provided by the State of Washington for cities like ours. We’re referred to as ‘Code Cities’ because we adopted that State’s template of ‘code’. And every few years we amended that template.

The members had already spoken among themselves in private and developed a work plan. Rather than simply amending the existing Rules of Procedure as we have every time in the past, they decided to do a complete re-write based on two cities they apparently found attractive. Bothell and Kirkland.

Non-decision

And regarding that consultant, as much as I admire Ms. McFarland, our City Council has never before felt it necessary to retain a ‘consultant’.  Deputy Mayor Buxton could have used her obvious vast store of energy and saved the taxpayers a few bucks on yet another ‘consulting fee’. And when I said that ‘the Council decided’ to hire her, actually City Manager Matthias says in the video that he had already researched hiring a consultant ahead of the meeting. So we really didn’t ‘decide’ anything, of course.

Side by side…

To give you a sense of why this bugs me so much… here is the table of contents and one page from our current rules concerning the role of presiding officer (Mayor). We have thirty seven rules and the whole thing takes up thirty three pages.

Now, here is a similar TOC and page describing the role of Mayor (presiding officer) from Kirkland. It has twenty five pages, but is subdivided into fifty five ‘rules’:

Looks easier, right? Sure. To you. But it functions exactly like our current system, which we already know how to navigate. And (sorry) it wasn’t meant for you. So again, the committee was starting from scratch, with two new documents, which do the same things, but are now formatted in a radically different manner. They were cutting and pasting large sections of each of these together before even sitting down?

Why forms don’t change…

Think about your 1040 tax form for a minute. Sure, it could be designed to be easier. But one reason it stays the same is because familiarity is a very good thing with legal documents.

Every year your accountant only goes over changes that might affect you. You expect the 1040 to look (mostly) the same every year. That allows you to focus only on the differences. That is also how the law works. You don’t generally scrap the entire presentation of the law. You amend it. To do otherwise would breed suspicion.

Proposing a completely new format forces any serious reader to review every frickin’ line old vs. new to make sure everyone covered all the bases.

So, far from making things ‘easier’, though the new system is meant to appear ‘friendlier’, it offers no real value. There are passages in the current RoP that could be made clearer or simplified for sure. But generally speaking, in no way is the current system difficult to understand. In fact, it’s waaaaaaaaaaaaaay simpler than most of the 1040EZ. Frankly, anyone who has real difficulty in navigating the current RoP, probably should not run for City Council.

And also, though they are a Public Committee of the Council, they provided none of the materials they were working from. So even if the public had shown up, it would’ve been impossible for them to follow along.

The process

As I wrote, the members mentioned in passing having looked at RoP from various ten other cities, but only Vancouver and SeaTac were mentioned by name and none of their code was used in the discussion. (Although they failed to mention the examples I submitted for some reason. 😀 )

So, they worked from that draft–going section by section through whole sections copied from Bothell and Kirkland. They mentioned sections they liked as being in blue? Sections they didn’t were in red? Sections they thought were ‘unneeded’ were simply cut out (eg. a travel budget, which many other cities do have, btw.) That was a theme: if there was something in those cities’ RoP that we do not currently have but which they did not appreciate, they didn’t say, “I know some people want to discuss that!” They simply cut it.

When they got to bits where they thought there might be hard opposition, they would say things like “that will be a discussion”, marked it off as such and then moved on.

At the tail end of the meeting a lot of the meeting was spent using the word ‘sanctions’. Basically, how to make the rules have some form of enforcement component.

Efficiency

By having what was essentially a private draft worked out in advance, they were, by their own able to get through about two thirds of their work in two hours. Woo hoo!

Left for next time? The apparently thorny subjects of ‘social media’ and ‘conflict of interest.’

Let’s talk about Bothell and Kirkland

I love Bothell. I was married off of Juanita Bay (which is technically Kirland? 😀 ) Hi there, Kirkland City Council! But those two cities are part of the North Shore School District, which includes Woodinville. Let’s just say that the (cough) demographics, challenges, and just about everything are slightly different from Des Moines. 😀

I’m sure both cities are doing great things and I mean that literally. Bothell and Kirkland have over twice the budget we do. (Long time watchers of our City Council meetings may remember Bothell because Traci Buxton has used them three times over the years as an example during salaries bumps for our City Manager. At last check, the Bothell guy was the highest paid City Manager in WA. And if we had as much money as either of these two cities, I’d be more inclined to think that appropriate as well.)

Why we would choose to use cities so different from ours as a model for either salaries or our RoP on escapes me. Perhaps those are the Cities my colleagues wish we could be.

Highlights

Spending Authority

All three agreed on the notion of raising the City Manager’s spending authority from $50,000 to $100,000, apparently to account for something ‘inflation’? Again, if we had twice the budget, I might be more amenable to twice the spending authority.

Appointments

They acknowledge that our Mayor has not always been using the proper procedure for appointments. So they seemed to indicate a willingness to just codify this de facto practice as the new rule. This doesn’t kill me because:

• Just look at our current assignments, which are solely and arbitrarily at the whim of the Mayor. He assigned himself to ten things, the Deputy Mayor to a dozen things, removed me from assignments during the term, and even invented assignments without a vote of the Council–in direct violation not of our RoP, but of the City Municipal Code.
• I’ve also registered at least a dozen complaints from residents who applied for various advisory positions and found the whole thing to be a black box. To which I reply, “Welcome to my world.” 😀

Two years to be mayor

One rule that has been controversial is the requirement that one must serve for two years to be eligible to be mayor or deputy mayor. All three members agreed that that this should be retained. Mahoney: “When I got started I didn’t know anything.”

I could not agree more. No matter what you think you know going in, it does take two years to understand what’s going on, let alone to do a fair job as Mayor. Without that experience, you are simply at the mercy of staff guidance. And no matter how helpful they are, that prevents one from maintaining the proper professional distance.

Councilmember Steinmetz has criticised me for not feeling he belonged on this one particular committee and this is exactly why. No matter how many games you’ve watched, it would be inappropriate having someone make rules about baseball until they had actually spent some time on the field.

Business Owners

Everyone felt that it was important to clear up any confusion as to the role business owners have on committees like the Lodging Tax Committee. The feeling seemed to be that since they generate business they should be in control.

I disagree completely. I believe that no City board/committee should ever be controlled by people who are not residents of Des Moines. Of course business owners should be a strong component of all relevant advisory groups; but never the controlling interest.

Sanctions

• The committee spent a lot of time discussing ‘sanctions’ and ‘punishment’.
• They also talked about having Councilmembers sign some form of ‘contract’ after being elected–agreeing to abide by the Rules of Procedure.
• A ‘three step process’ was mentioned.

Councilmember Steinmetz mentioned the possibility of conducting a ‘sanction’ process in Executive Session. And for the uninitiated, Executive Session means in private. Nothing from Executive Session may be recorded or even discussed in public.

¹And here’s the best part: Under state law you’re never allowed to tell people anything as to what just occurred behind the curtain. Ever. You’re not even required to provide Minutes if you don’t want to. ES is the exact opposite of accountability and transparency.

In the past, the only time there has been an Executive Session here concerning an elected was when an elected was involved in litigation that might involve the City (eg. Don Wasson, ca. 2003.) There was no ES during the Anthony Martinelli kerfuffle because legally speaking his personal issues did not affect the conduct of City business.

This will be interesting.

Better…

For those of you who will complain ‘fake news!’? Fine. Show up at the next one, which is September 29 at 5:00PM. I told you that, they didn’t. Listen for yourself. Demand a recording. Prove me wrong; or over the top; or a complete fabulist.

This is my opinion (one of the rule changes the committee seems to want is that one provide an explicit disclaimer at all times)

The word ‘better’ was mentioned many, many times without defining what that means.

The RoPs in Bothell and Kirkland may appear more user-friendly, but ‘user-friendly’ was never our problem so I don’t see that change as ‘better’ or even ‘necessary’. I see it as taking time.

But the discussion I heard did nothing to address my definitions of ‘better’. Which are:

• Transparency
• Access to information
• Accountability
• Outreach, both to the public and to members of the Council.

Regardless of any personal animus, these changes will affect every new Councilmember going forward. It will create a new ceiling as to what is possible here, using two very different cities as the model. Candidates will fool themselves into thinking, “Oh, I’ll be nicer. It won’t be a problem for me.” That. Does. Not. Happen.

Be careful…

As I said, without any specifics, the City of SeaTac was mentioned in passing. Like Bothell and Kirkland, SeaTac’s budget is also at least twice our size. But their RoP does address many of my concerns. And many of those improvements were made in the past five or six years, by a Council with very different politics. Which only goes to show that good government is not about ideology. Ironically, it is exactly as Deputy Mayor Buxton said in her opening remarks. It all comes down to one’s ethics.

But that’s a conundrum that more than one CM has expressed to me in private over the years. By implementing processes like a right to inquiry and providing more public access to meetings and town halls, the prior SeaTac Council helped contribute to the recent change in their Council majority.

In other words, if you work to make your government truly more transparent, accountable and inclusive you make it easier to be replaced.