I’ve some catching up to do on our last Common Council meeting. The last Police and Fire Commission meeting had a posted agenda so short that it was easy to tease about it. The agenda crammed item after item, including two police officer interviews, into a proposed 20 minute window. (See, Whitewater’s Latest Police and Fire Commission Meeting, of May 2009.)
Well, at the latest Common Council meeting, there was a quick — but futile, I think — discussion that the meeting was longer than 20 minutes. In fact, there’s was quick mention that it lasted past eight o’clock. There now, everything’s better – move along, nothing to see, here.
Predictably, Chief Coan can’t explain why the agenda allotted only 20 minutes for so much. No one at the meeting noted who wrote the agenda, and that’s the problem, of course. The agenda’s not a perfunctory matter, not a clerical obligation, but an official announcement that should have come from real oversight from the Police and Fire Commission. I don’t know where the agenda comes from, either.
One need only look at the agendas of Whitewater’s PFC over the years, improved only by a colorful logo on recent ones, to see that they look like a spare, half-hearted effort.
That’s the problem with the whole Police and Fire Commission, though. We’ve had problem after problem with leadership in this city, and anything that involves department public notice (not involving self-congratulatory announcements) resembles little more than a reluctant child’s homework — as few words, and as much white space, as possible.
If we were Camelot, where all was well, maybe it wouldn’t matter.
This, however, is not Camelot, Jim Coan’s not a legendary king, the PFC’s not a knights’ roundtable, and we’ve not a class of nobles presiding over an idyllic kingdom. A few hundred want to believe as much, but believing does not make it so.
Real work, a thorough agenda, for a meeting in a suitable chamber, televised, would be a start.
Just a start, but something.