City Council Streamlines Protocols After Clash

An agreement by the city council will allow the Mayor and City Manager to confer about whether certain information requests by councilmembers merit research even before they’re adopted as agenda items.

The council hammered out these, and other, protocols to establish a rubric for generating new agenda items and for governing communications between councilmembers and city officials, including the city manager and city attorney, at Monday’s city council meeting.

The interest in establishing such protocols stems from during past meetings about the way councilmembers either added or blocked certain agenda items; it came to a head when councilperson Steve Barbose added a last-minute item to develop a advisory group, on the heals of the announcement that Staples was building a Sonoma branch.

The council’s straw vote Monday on the new rules – which will now be drawn up by City Manager Linda Kelly and City Attorney Jeffrey Walter –is precursor to an official vote scheduled for the council’s next meeting.  

Among the protocols approved by the council were:

1. All timely requests (those submitted within ten business days of the next council meeting) by councilmembers for a new item on the next meeting’s agenda will be honored.
2. Late requests for agenda items will be pushed back to the meeting after the upcoming one – unless there is, in Walter’s words, a “demonstrated need” for their timely address.
3. Councilmembers may submit no more than three information requests (usually submitted as research for possible agenda items) to the city manager’s office a week.
4. Information requests that will take more than an hour of time to research (as determined by the city manager) are themselves rolled into agenda items subject to council’s approval – unless timeliness is crucial. This last point will be decided on jointly by the mayor and city manager, at the request of the councilperson proposing the expedited review.

Monday’s discussion between Kelly, Walter and the council was complicated by considerations around the Brown Act, a state law that restricts behind-the-scenes government activity. Councilperson Stephen Barbose, for example, suggested that decisions made around information requests could be dictated by an informal council vote conducted over the phone or through e-mail. He likened the idea of subjecting information requests to formal approval as “trying to turn a 19-wheeler around in a parking lot … we ought to just take a head count; you get a few nods and you’re good to go.”

But Walter responded that such a vote would violate the Brown Act stipulation that councilmembers not collectively make decisions in a non-public setting.  He said the Brown Act would allow such a vote to be held, but only if there was no communication between councilmembers – in other words, only if their votes were cast in secret and without deliberation.

“If used judiciously, the city manager has the authority to survey individuals, as long as she doesn’t share that information,” Walter said.

Ultimately, the council determined that such a process would be too involved; in its place, they voted to let the mayor and city manager determine what proposals merit more than an hour of time. “I, for one, am comfortable having our mayor and city manager make that decision,” said councilperson Ken Brown.   

Walter repeatedly expressed concern about the “prevalent use” of information requests by councilmembers – particularly those that require more than an hour of research.  He suggested that such requests automatically become agenda items, subject to the council’s majority approval, in order to limit the city manager’s burden.

But both Brown and councilperson Joanne Sanders insisted that some research proposals necessitate a speedy review. “Sometimes something comes to the council that is important and timely and does take more than an hour,” Brown said. Sanders added that “it is really important (certain items) not be put off,” including, in some cases, late requests for research.

Following its vote on agenda-related protocols, the council briefly turned its attention to “Rosenberg’s Rules of Order: Simple Parliamentary Procedures for the 21st Century.” Sanders had requested that each councilperson view a video on the Rosenberg rubric before Monday’s meeting.

The council agreed that the rules – procedural guidelines around things like speaking in turn, putting motions forward and showing courtesy – would mostly just formalize the rules they already observe, with some very minor tweaks here and there. The Council voted, unanimously, to have Kelly and Walter draw up another document based on the Rosenberg principles.

“These types of procedures aren’t normally something I welcome,” Barbose said. “But I watched the video and I liked it, and I think we should implement these … The only way you can tell if it works or not is to try it out.”