Media

Usually this is more the county's thing but they have meetings starting at 9:30, 11:00, 2:00, 8:00 and 12:30 - in addition to their 4:30 and 4:45 start times. 9 out of 21 start before 5:00.

Everything will be passed in one big motion except for the following unless it changes at the meeting or someone shows up to speak. Looks like they plan to talk about youth and adult employment programs (Bidar-Sielaff), 134 Fair Oaks TIF (Ahrens) and Public Market Foundation (Rummel).

Often there are over 50-100 items the city council votes on in one motion on the council floor unless an alder pulls it off the agenda to discuss - or a member of the public shows up to speak on it. And even when members of the public speak, they hear what they have to say then pass the items without comment. Here's and overview of the meeting and a brief summary of what they probably won't talk about tonight, but we'll find out when the consent calendar comes out later today - I usually post them as "Things the Council with Talk About" or similarly labeled blog posts. So much gets done with almost no comment at this point.

Last night the Homeless Issues Committee met - and they got updates and presentations on the County Affordable Housing Fund, the City Affordable Housing Fund, the Street Outreach Program as well as City and County Budgets, the homeless day resource center, Messner's site proposals for affordable housing, and the proposal to place a portapotty downtown for people sleeping outside - plus they talked about their priorities for the upcoming year.

3 meetings . . .

Also several cancelled meeting . . .

Lots of cancellations and missing agendas - its that time of year . . .

So hard to keep up with everything going on, so here's some things on my mind!

3 meetings . . .

4 of the 9 meetings are before 5pm. 3:00, 12:00, 1:00, 11:30? Are these times for an open and transparent government to be meeting? And on the Alliant Energy Center, Criminal Justice Council and Equity and Inclusion Advisory Board??

20 meetings, 5 before 4:00 . . . 9 before 5:00 . . .

So, I started blogging and it wasn't going well because I missed a few things . . . but turns out, no matter how hard I tried, I would have missed that last hour of the meeting because it was shouted down. The board kept going, voting with a thumbs up or thumbs down with staff yelling to them what they were voting on. Conservative superiors were upset they didn't get to debate and in the end were threatening to look into legal ways to declare the meeting invalid . . . and in effect, derail the jail.