Thursday, August 01, 2013

Shawnee Government - Open or Closed

On next Tues, 8/6/13 at city hall, the council committee will have their regularly scheduled meeting at 7:00PM.

One of the items on the agenda is:

DISCUSS PS-7, CONDUCT AT A PUBLIC MEETING.

PS-7 covers various items.  Among them how the council president is selected, vise-chairman of the committee, AND how input from the public is handled at council meetings.  I'm curious if certain members of the council are going to try and restrict citizen input.  At a council meeting a few weeks ago Jeff Vaught tried to stop a member of the public from coming back to the podium to address some of Vaught's comments.  Since the mayor didn't interject I had to be rude and mention from the audience that the individual was entitled to a second comment period under PS-7.  Ironically, in the next item on the agenda the mayor reiterated that folks are permitted up to two times of no more than 5 minutes on any one subject.  Guess Vaught thinks he runs the council meetings.  Just like he erroneously thought when he was council president that other members of the council had to go through him to request the city manager put items on the agenda.

It will be interesting to see what changes, if any, the council considers making to this policy statement.

The city inquired of other local governments what their policies and procedures are for meetings and the results of those inquiries are available at

http://www.cityofshawnee.org/WEB/ShawneeCMS.nsf/vwContent/PS7Research?OpenDocument
 

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