At this past council meeting on 1/27/20 the issue of a new council president and a vice-chair of the council committee had still not been decided.
Leah Wankum of the Shawnee Mission Post has a nice article about what happened and it can be read by clicking here.
I would like to point out a few things that took place. When the item came up Councilmember Eric Jenkins brought forth info about how the current procedures did not cover what had happened previously. At the previous meeting, the votes for both procedures were tied and in both cases the mayor did not vote to break the tie. As such, no council president, no committee vice-chair. Jenkins thought it was time to fix the system before proceeding further. Makes sense.
During that discussion Councilmember Lindsey Constance snuck in a motion to elect Matt Zimmerman as Council President and Dr. Mike Kemmling as Committee Vice-chair. Seconded by Zimmerman. Now the discussion continued with more councilmembers seeming to want to fix the system. But, the only way to proceed was if Constance withdrew her motion. She refused. Uh oh. Trouble in River City, because the seconding of the motion was withdrawn. This should have been an eye opener for Constance. It wasn't.
Moving down the road a motion was made by Jenkins to bring the matter to the committee for a revision of Policy Statement 7 and Charter Ordinance 45. Again, it makes sense, let's clean up procedures. While the clean up is taking place Dr. Kemmling as the senior council member by length of service would act as interim President and Chair of the Council Committee.
Follow this: When the vote was taken to move it to committee new councilmember Tammy Thomas who had spoken eloquently on the situation voted yes, followed by Zimmerman, Jenkins and Kemmling. Hmmmmm, 4 votes to take it to committee for a review and revision of procedures. Now it comes to Lisa Larson-Bunnell who voted no (apparently she was upset that she hadn't won the election for council president and didn't care to fix the system). Knappen was absent. Then Constance voted no. In a way that was a dumb move, considering the person she nominated voted to fix the system. Duhhhhhh!!!!! Then the other new councilmember Jill Chalfie (who had remained silent) looked at Constance with a deer in the headlights look and also voted no.
So, the item will move to the council committee to work on revisions to the governing documents so as to make the system more defined. It's a shame that Larson-Bunnell, Constance and Chalfie could not see the advantages to fixing a system that needed fixing.
Let's see what happens at next week's committee meeting, Tuesday 2/4/20 at city hall at 7PM
