Minimal savings reported from reducing Council Meetings
January 19, 2013 in Uncategorized By: Dave Emerson
(Los Alamitos, 1/19/2013) For about seven months now Los Alamitos’ City Council has only had one Regular City Council Meeting a month, after fifty years of two-a-month.
A couple of reasons were publicly given for cutting the number of meetings in half: Cost savings and greater staff efficiency.
Guess how much was actually saved?
According to our City Manager’s math in her Staff Report on Tuesday Night’s Agenda Item 10 B, “Cost Savings of One City Council Meeting Per Month,” $2,533 per meeting.
And that number’s probably way too high. For one thing, it assumes meetings are 5 hours long, whether they are held once or twice a month. That contradicts both common sense and practical experience.
For another, it assumes no special meetings will be held, which has not been the case.
Let’s say monthly meetings are 5 hours long on average, and bi-monthly ones are 3.5 hours long, and the prep meetings the City Attorney attends are also 30% shorter. Then the savings is actually cut in half, to about $1,250 per meeting.
Throw in a Special Meeting every third month reduces the savings by another 33%, roughly.
Then the annual cost of two meetings a month becomes 8 less meetings x $1250, or $10,000. About 1/10 of a percent of Los Alamitos’ annual budget.
The benefits of a second meeting? For starters:
- Meetings could start at 7:00, not 6:00, making it easier for the people to observe and participate.
- Meetings would be more apt to end by 10:00, rather than running until midnight.
- Shorter meetings = shorter agendas = better focus on the issues at hand.
- Items could be addressed in a timely fashion.
The other benefit of only one meeting per month, in the words of the staff report, is
Besides the stated cost savings of having only one meeting per month, staff has been able to more effectively plan, execute and evaluate projects without the continuous cycle of preparing for the next City Council meeting.
That’s hard to quantify, but it would seem like that could be minimized with proper organization and planning.
A third alternative?
There are other alternatives as well. For example, City Council Meetings could be held every third week, regardless of where that falls in the calendar.
On the whole, I’m not nearly as enthusiastic about these once a month meetings as the Staff report seems to be.
What do you think?
Really it made more sense when Edgar and Poe were there. Why ? Because those two rambled on more than anyone ever has. I think now the meeting will be shorter no matter if they are 1 or 2 a month.
Why was it done? Not the cost savings, which is minimal. It was done because every meeting has a open comments section where people can talk for a whole five minutes. Now whey would you want to reduce the ability of people to communicate to the council? Could it be that you are the mayor, your leadership has been one of constant failure and you are running for higher office and don’t want to get hammered twice a month by members of the public on what a total failure you have been as a leader in the city?
“What? You means this was all engineered by the former Mayor of Los Alamitos to protect his ability to run for higher office?
NO! You HAVE to be kidding!”
Sorry, but I’m not.
The fact is that the cost savings have been minimal at best. So, once you remove the cost savings from the equation, all that is left is the politics of it.
But I would propose a different tact than Dave.
I would like the first Monday (Tuesday) to be an open working forum.
That means that there is no agenda, there is no vote, but there is an open meeting which City Council Members may or may not choose to attend. City staff may choose or choose not to attend.
But every first Monday the City opens City Hall from 7PM until the meeting is closed to a meeting where the people can meet with their elected officials and city staff and discuss the issues around the city. There can be topic brought up by any member of the City Council, the City Staff or a community member.
Since these are workshops, there is no concern dealing with Brown Act violations since everyone is free to attend and discuss anything they want. It provides a sounding board for the electeds to meet with those that are not and discuss the issues and concerns that anyone may have. It would permit open conversation (unlike attempting to talk with a member of City Council at City Council. I mean how many times did C.A. Sandy state that our elected officials are not allowed to talk WITH us, only at us.).
It would foster open communications. It would be transparent. It could also be broadcast, and since we have connectivity in the chamber now, it could be set up to allow people to call in and participate via skype or other conferencing software.
It could be used to herald a new age of communication and openness. Imagine an item coming up in the open workshop and then being placed on the agenda two weeks later, an item brought up by one of the kids at LAHS taking the government class. An idea that addresses the concerns of a segment of the community that normally doesn’t get to provide input.
Dean Grose asked a solid question. What has been the cost of this political exercise? The cost has been higher than the savings.
It’s time to throw out the bad bathwater with the two former members of City Council that made us all wade in it for the last seven months, and rather than just returning to the old ways, let’s see what we can do to make the city more transparent and responsive to the community.