Quote Originally Posted by Midtowner View Post
...There's no reason they can't do this in an open meeting. If someone has to come back with answers, I'm sure most things can wait a week. If not, folks need to come to meetings prepared. It's a good skill to have...
There are 100+ reasons. If every item on each week’s agenda got a full discussion including what recommendation was being made by staff and how they arrived at their decisions then council would have to meet seven days a week. Instead, they generally rely on staff recommendations unless an item is large/complex in nature and/or has any amount of controversy, in which case it gets detailed discussion, which in many cases can last hours.

The standard operating procedure, by the way, is that if an item impacts a specific ward then the Council member elected in that ward takes the lead, conducts meetings - ahead of the item being advanced to council - as needed with City staff (gasp!) and also with individual constituents and groups as dictated by the situation. Then when it comes to council, as a professional courtesy other Council members fall in line and vote with the Council member of the affected ward, unless they have specific insight or principles which make them vote against the others (as is of course their right and responsibility). In this way Council members divide up the massive task of gathering information dictating how they should vote, without each council member being required to spend many hours individually researching the hundred plus items which appear on the agenda each week.

“Prepared” means being fully prepared for all items in your own ward, plus being prepared to discuss and vote on larger items and expenditures which affect the entire city. How might one do this, you might ask? Well, by being BRIEFED BY THE STAFF YOU EMPLOY and empower to do day-to-day research, meetings, negotiations and recommendations to you as a governing body. This exactly how a strong city manager form of government works (as opposed to strong mayor).

I hate to get too reductive with the civics lesson, but just so everyone is clear, our local form of government by design resembles a corporation with a board of directors (city council) and a CEO (city manager). City Council has the direct ability to hire and fire three people; the city manager, the city auditor and the city attorney. By design, each of these individuals and their departments are mostly autonomous in order to protect them from political pressure from the other.

City Council can fire the city manager with five votes on any Tuesday (this has been done in the past) but as long as they have confidence in this person they give him or her near-absolute authority to run the daily affairs of the City. Their job at that point is to review the work that the city manager and his staff perform on our and their behalf. When this work involves expenditures, contracts and the like their job is to approve them - provided they have confidence in the job performed by staff - or deny, in unusual circumstances. By the way, if too many items start getting denials at Council it’s probably time for a city manager to polish up the ol’ resume.

The city manager is a professional administrator, and his staff includes professional negotiators, professional planners, public safety professionals, engineers, and other highly-trained individuals. They are hired to do this work and to be good at it. They are advised by legal professionals on the City Attorney’s staff.

City Council members are none of these things (except of course when by coincidence a professional in one of these fields has been voted into office). Nor do they need to be. We aren’t asking or requiring them to conduct negotiations, to design bridges, to hire City staff and do HR, to make policing recommendations, or to advise the City legally. The City Council members are citizens who have been elected instead to oversee the professionals hired to conduct our business, and to advocate for their respective wards.

Literally THE ONLY WAY Council can make informed decisions on complicated items is to meet with staff ahead of council meetings and to be briefed on these topics; to get background on them, to understand who the players are, and to understand how City staff reached its recommendation. At this point, it is their right and responsibility to do further research if they desire and to discuss any point they wish to discuss during the public meeting where they will then publicly cast a vote.

Again, quite similar to the board of directors of a corporation, non-profit, etc..