It was, last night, a quiet and somnolent setting in which our Common Council recommended to the Joint Review Board five new TIDs. I’ll give the atmosphere of the meeting some attention.
Often, a public meeting takes place in early evening, so that citizen-representatives can attend without missing work. They’ve worked all day, under conditions that have been hectic and demanding, and afterward they find themselves in a new arena, that requires as much energy and vigor as their working conditions. It’s no easy task to be as ready and energized at seven in the evening as seven in the morning.
Those who work for the city have an advantage over those who work elsewhere, and then merely visit, so to speak, the municipal arena. Ordinary citizens are not as fresh and ready to go. It showed last night, and I have sympathy for those who have to gear up for another round of intense work after a day of intense work.
The City Manager, and the Police Chief who sat at his right rand, had no such dual roles with which to contend. Their days might have been hectic, but they were not, certainly, as different from their evenings as those who came to the meeting after a full day of private work.
That’s one reason it’s easy for a public official to meet citizen objections at a legislative meeting – the official is fresher for the meeting, and has likely spent more time preparing for it.
Sometimes replies to objections are silly. Consider, for example, Kevin Brunner’s contention, in reply to a concern about notice of the TIF plan, that the city manager’s weekly report had provided ample notice about TIF, for weekly issue after weekly issue. That’s hardly notice, in a popular way. A message in a bottle floating in the Indian Ocean would be more widely read than the city’s manager’s report. (No one at last night’s meeting would say so, however, because the reply would be that both council members, and citizens, were notified. That’s truer with council members than the citizens they represent. There’s notice, and then there’s popular notice, literally and figuratively)
Initiatives or proposals from citizen commissions or bodies like the CDA often have a momentum that’s difficult for a citizen-legislator to stop. The commission claims exhaustive research, careful consideration, and thorough analysis, and so the presumption is that the citizen-legislator should approve it all. Even simple questions are easily portrayed as unwelcome objections, or ignorant and ill-informed second-guessing.
(That’s the none-too-subtle implication of Kevin Brunner’s remark to a council member that the member was new to council, and so not up-to-speed on all the many deliberations over the months preceding. Too funny: if it’s really a well-discussed issue, then it should be a community issue where awareness does not depend on legislative office.)
It’s hard, though, for a citizen, or citizen-legislator, to challenge a polished, full-time professional in that situation. Hard, mostly, because it’s so easy for the full-time manager to make someone else look and feel like an obstructionist, and to do it delicately. Our city manager has surely played this role – in one arena or another – for much of his life.
The answer, of course, is to match delicacy with delicacy, subtlety with subtlety. That’s hard to do after a day working somewhere else. The citizen-volunteer tends, from weariness and lack of rehearsal, to be blunt; the polished manager tends typically between being overly-solicitous and condescending by way of reply. (That professional technique works well, after all; some of those who spoke scarcely ventured their own opinions, but instead deferred to City Manager Brunner and how much thought he – rather than they — had put into the matter.)