Live blogged. Will update periodically. Controversial items referred. Will discuss meeting electronically and prohibiting committees from meeting.You can (n’t) follow along here:
They often start late . . . but more than a full 15 minutes have passed. The live watching on the city website is down. I didn’t realize they started the meeting so I only got connected via citichannel on TV so I missed the getting started and
They have quorum and are meeting. IT is working on the online access. I missed the first 26 minutes of the meeting. You’ll have to watch that yourself unless I get back to it, which is doubtful.
Follow along here:
ALDER ELECTRONIC MEETINGS
PRESENTATION BY IT
Zoom is the meeting technology they are looking at using for remote meetings. It has strict permissions, it allows for roll call, it allows IT media team to facilitate the meetings. They have to think about Roberts Rules and how that will work. They have to figure out the public registration form, on line. We need to make sure that they can identify it is the person who registers. They have to create training materials and train alders, committee staff and committee chairs. They also have an operational team to figure out when streaming video isn’t working, a call drops, etc. They have to facilitate the logistics. She says this is super quick, they are doing their best, no solution is going to be perfect. They are aiming for 75% and there are going to be problems. They are just breathing trying to get though each day.
QUESTIONS ON REMOTE MEETINGS FOR THE COUNCIL
Alder Sally Rhoher asks how they will ensure that the people who register are the people on the call. Boyce Johnson says that they will use the webinar function, and people will have a code to sign in.
Alder Syed Abbas asks about support for the alders. Johnson says they will have tech support and ask people to sign in early to make sure everything is working. IT Director says that they hope to have two people on staff to be able to answer the questions. They will do a test run. They will start with the Finance Committee. Edgerton says that they will be able to take everything they learn here and apply it towards the legislative replacement project. There is a positive to this.
Alder Abbas asks about sharing info about how to connect with cell phone, laptop, etc. Edgerton says yes.
Alder Samba Baldeh asks if they have enough licensing for Zoom and Go To Meetings. Edgerton says they have enough for now, they can purchase the services monthly. I didn’t hear the second question about budget. Edgerton says she will have to move some things around.
Mayor says there is a finance protocol to figure out how to deal with the extra expenses, they are tracking it and hoping to apply it to federal and state funding.
Baldeh asks how the public will participate if they are not tech saavy. Edgerton says they have to look at what meetings they can cover. She only has a staff of 46 and she has already moved as many as she can, but things like cyber security are still working. They are possibly able to get a few more staff for more meetings, they won’t be able to do all the meetings, they have to pick the essential meetings and do those.
Alder Sheri Carter asks about Zoom and planning, are they looking long range that we might be doing this until December, having remote meetings. Edgerton says its a day by day thing and they will look at it as they go along. She doesn’t want to stop projects, but the new legislative software won’t go into effect until 2022, and this might be our reality for right now.
Alder Lindsay Lemmer asks if there is a limit on the number of attendees with the Zoom licenses. Johnson says he thinks that the licenses should be sufficient even for a controversial topic. They will ask those not giving input to go online or watch on tv.
Alder Grant Foster asks if there could be some smaller committees that don’t get as much support, but have the committee chairs or staff fill those roles.
Edgerton says there could be a phone option. She is only thinking about the 6 she has been told she needs to cover. We could look at it in three weeks and see how it is going. We also have to remember our staff who staff the committees that are already stressed out, they are working from home and now they have to learn a whole new technology. If we can’t meet with them person to person, that is going to be difficult for some of them.
Alder Marsha Rummel asks about setting up cameras in smaller rooms instead of using a platform people need to use. Johnson says the online programs not work with more traditional systems. They are redoing this room right now, and they are looking at conferencing systems. He says its not practical right now. Rummel asks what they would need to set up the council conference room. Johnson says they are doing a pilot and getting quotes, but that is not the same system that we are setting up for this. Edgerton says if you are not in the room, there is nothing to record. There is that issue. They are having a hard time getting hardware right now. They pulled some computers out of the recycle bin, some people have to plug in.
Rummel says that its distressing that she is on committees that won’t be able to meet.
Edgerton says that they are not only using Zoom for remote meetings but the agencies can set it up too. They are doing internal and external meetings. She could reach out to agencies that might be able to do it. The council office has the whole tool kit – but where there is public participation we need to use these tools. They agree that council members can still have their meetings that don’t require public participation.
Mayor says that there is difference between internal and public meetings, which require the ability for the public to participate, those require two different solutions. Skype or Zoom or Go To Meeting can’t facilitate a public meeting. That is why IT is working so hard, that is the complication here. People need to have public registration processes.
Alder Tag Evers asks about neighborhood meetings, for developments that don’t want to be delayed, any advice to alders who might have a meeting on the 31st that have a developer that wants to move ahead. Evers will send an email to IT about it.
Mayor says that they recommend suspending all neighborhood and public information meetings right now. She says it is less than ideal and they will have to work with it on a case by case basis.
Foster asks about the public having to be able to listen in or watch, but do they have to participate. Is that an option given the times we are in. Can meetings we streamed or available and not have public participate.
Attorney May says state law says it has to be open and accessible but testimony is not required. Our ordinances are more robust, all committee meetings have public comment sections. The issue is we are trying to comply with our own requirements.
Foster asks if that shifts the ability to expand the number of meetings that could happen. A smaller meeting that doesn’t have much public, could they have remote participation for the members without public engagement.
May says that one of the issues is that the Attorney General says that any meeting has to include a physical place where someone can appear and participate in the meeting. You can’t have a meeting by telephonic means without a place for the public to watch.
Edgerton says that we still need city staff to staff the meeting, they will still need media team support and there are only 5 of them and there is only so much they can do.
Carter asks Attorney May about holding neighborhood meetings with facebook live?
May says that neighborhood meetings are not public meetings or subject to open meetings laws, so you can do that.
Edgerton says if you are holding the meeting and not asking for city staff assistance. If you ask city staff to assist we don’t have agreement about the “terms and conditions” with Facebook. City staff had been using Adobe Type and clicking on the terms and conditions and we had 2000 users and they said we owed $3,000. If you want to do it, you can.
Carter asks how people will keep records of the meeting.
May says the minutes would be kept like any other meeting. I don’t know if we would keep it, if its on city channel that would be a record for a period of time. But the real record will be the minutes like now.
Alder Patrick Heck if all the meetings could be recorded.
Edgerton says they can do that, and they will have the city channel recordings.
Rohrer asks if the Zoom would be on streaming and citichannel?
Yes.
Edgerton says they will also be using Youtube now too.
DISCUSSION
Bidar says this will require quite a bit of technical support because it is a public meeting. I’m sure we will get amazing instructions and the public will too, but this is not going to be easy and there will be technical issues. We need to ask for patience. She would be surprised if it is just right the first time around. Sometimes our meetings are pretty long, we have 3 IT people supporting just our meeting, we need to be aware of the additional work in the already stressed out staff. She thanks them for making the council a priority. We need to be able to meet because this is where the buck stops. There will be many decisions over the next few months that we aren’t able to yet predict. She assumes everyone supports this because we all want to be home. She wants people to participate in trials before the 31st.
Rummel asks about subunits allowing people to attend telphonically with notice, but the council never could. She asks about the part about a public health emergency, is that the only time we can attend by phone?
The Mayor says that currently the only way a council member can participate by phone is in an emergency meeting, this is for regular meetings.
May say no voting by proxy or telephonic meetings without an emergency meeting. This expands it to allow these meetings when there is a clear emergency or health issue where people can’t get to the council chambers. It is limited to that right now. This is for the current emergency today.
The second one deals with committees.
Rummel asks if there is a polar vortex would this cover that?
Mayor says it would have to be an emergency that is declared at any level. The mayor can declare an emergency but it would have to be ratified by the council.
Bidar says they may want to extend this in the future. That is another discussion for another time. She says this is just for the place and time we are now. We shouldn’t be figuring out long term solutions right now, in the future we can discuss especially after we work on our technical abilities.
Alder Patrick Heck asks if there can be mixed mode meetings – is this all or nothing. May says that people could be here as long as they can be seen. It would not prohibit two or three alders being here.
Mayor says what prohibits us is the public health orders, we are exempt, but orders say 10 of us shouldn’t be in the room. Mayor says we wouldn’t want 10 people in the room, but maybe in the future.
Carter asks if the deadline of the 31st, is that realistic.
Edgerton says yes, Boyce nodded yes, but thank you for asking.
VOTE
Motion passes
PROHIBITING COMMITTEES FROM MEETING
QUESTIONS
Bidar asks how many meetings the IT staff can support in addition to the city council meetings every two weeks.
Edgerton says for now, it would be 5 or so and that could be expanded later.
Bidar asks if ordinances can be changed by resolution.
Attorney May says no.
Alder Barbara Harrington-McKinney asks where the 200 meetings come from.
Edgerton says she doesn’t know how many we have.
Attorney May says that there are over 100 meetings and some meet twice a month, he would guess 150 a month plus the council meetings.
Edgerton says that many of the meetings are at the same time and they couldn’t staff them all.
DISCUSSION
Alder Rummel says that she is fine about this moment in time, and we picked the 5 that are important. She is concerned about neighborhoods not being able to meet but Plan Commission moves forward. We’re not allowing Community Development to meet to allocate funds for services. But we allow a development proposal to get a land use approval. Can we wait? (I missed a bunch) She has three new proposals in one week, she already cancelled one meeting and isn’t setting up the others. She’s not going to have a meeting on line.
Foster moves referral to CCEC (Common Council Executive Committee). Foster thanks IT and we are all dealing with a bunch of bad choices and won’t get something perfect. He supports cancelling non-essential meetings right now and it makes sense to prioritize some of the meetings right now. He doesn’t think adopting this ordinance is going to help get the meetings cancelled and will be a problem in future situations. He thought the mayor’s meeting guidelines were good. He was surprised that public meetings were not part of the process of EOC and their goals. We got part of a presentation about what work is happening, but it seems this is pretty low on the totem pole (he apologizes for using that word). Our boards committees and commissions can be gone for 2 months, 6 months or 2 years. He knows there are solutions out there, we will figure it out and it will take time. We can’t limit it to 4 or 5 meetings that happen on an on-going basis. This is too broadly written. This cancels all meetings any time there is any kind of emergency and the only way a committee would meeting is if the Mayor and council president agree. This doesn’t seem to be what we need, we shouldn’t be giving this up. We don’t need this for the next three weeks. All the meetings that needed to be cancelled are all cancelled without this ordinance. We have a mechanism to do that, its our committee chairs. And people can not show up and the meeting won’t happen. He is referring to think about it more, it doesn’t make sense to take this up – this is not needed to cancel meetings.
Alder Evers asks if there are ramifications to referrals.
Michael May says that alder Foster is correct the chairs can cancel meetings, their hands will be tied and they will have to cancel meetings. The health director and mayor could cancel the meetings if need be. May says that the purpose of the rules is to put some structure. He says that steps will need to be taken to cancel meetings.
Evers asks if there are remifications of delaying for two weeks.
May says that the main ramification is that any meetings that need to be cancelled positive steps would have to be taken to have cancel the meetings. Otherwise positive steps would be needed to have the meeting.
Bidar says that the idea that in an emergency we are going to think we have to go around and talk about whether to cancel or not, or people show up when they didn’t get cancellation of the meeting. The transparency is that everything gets cancelled except the core things. We have many people who serve and its confusing, people show up because they didn’t know it was cancelled. We are living in emergency situations. For us to be thinking that for the next few months that we shouldn’t be working very narrowly – we are in unprecedented times. If this goes on for a long time, we need to re-evaluate, maybe in 3 or 4 months we can think about how to improve the language. For tonight, we need clear action. Things may change dramatically tomorrow again. So there aren’t another 5 phone calls of confusion while we are all stressed. We owe it to our IT staff to have clarity of the work plan. If they know there are 5 meetings. Some of you see that we added Transportation Commission for 4/15. That will be added. There is a deep issue here of . .. we keep talking about public participation, having remote meetings is reducing participation, so having a number of meetings with out the public without having the public participate, is the least amount of equity. She thinks that the Plan Commission issue is a good one, people on plan commission should refer it. Maybe there is an emergency and someone is going to build a hospital, we might not have time for public participation, things like that are happening. She urges them to take action, this isn’t perfect, we can change it later on when we have more experience, time and ability.
Alder Barbara Harrington McKinney says on Sunday morning when the order came out about 250 people not being able to meet, one of the pastors said that they were going to have service anyways. I reminded the pastor that there were vulnerable in the congregation, he did not adhere until the order came out including faith communities. We are in a time now where the social, health, well being of our community is at stake. We had so many cancellations last week because people were afraid of coming in contact, there was not a choice. To leave that up to a chair of a commission would say my committee is important so I will have a meeting. The library wanted to remain open. Some of the workers wanted it, some did not. When the edict came out, that was clear, distinct, there was no question about it. This is serious. We are at a point where we need to act now. Putting it off to another meeting, things are changing so rapidly, that is what we heard consistently, things are changing so rapidly and in order to act – putting this off to the 28th, we don’t know what will happen. We need to be clear and concise. This back and forth and jockeying and political strategy is not working for her. What is before us is the health and well being of the citizens before us. We can go back and change it. Action must be taken now.
Evers says that speaking to the memo, he asks that ALRC be cancelled as well. All bars are closed. Replace that will more essential business. Is that something we talk about here?
Mayor says the list is not before her, when they wrote the memo the bars were open, now that they are not it will be taken into consideration.
Evers will support this, we can change it. He says if staff is asking for it, we should support it.
Rummel says if this passes tonight, the underlying question is what is important and what gets thrown to the side for an unknown period of time. What about community services, homeless services. She hopes the mayor and council president keeps those things in mind. The world is upside down. People are losing money and jobs, a development proposal can wait, we are in a crisis. We need to be sending the right message. Some things go forward, and some things are off the table. It would be important to her about refining the proposal and the message.
Baldeh asks about the last sentence of the proposal, Mayor and council president overturn what the experts say.
May says overturning what the Public Health Director has ordered? He says they don’t do it. It’s recognizing that we want people to do essential functions. They would still make efforts not to have more than 10 people. Boards, committees and commmissions can already meet telephonically. They can’t go against the public health director.
I missed what Marci Poulson said.
Arvina Martin says that this is probably going to be the most serious thing we are facing. She urges against referral. She thinks the big thing is we need to take action in order to prevent a huge crisis from happening here. If you look at the graphs of how this disease has spread. (I missed some here – friends, you can see I”m busy here!! 🙂 ) We need to be decisive, we need to do our part and make decisions quickly.
Zach Henak says that it is safe to say we want to do everything we can to assist in the crisis, and support our staff. We also have to remember that panic can encourage decisions that are not as good as they could be. This ordinance is important. Everything I heard tonight, I haven’t’ seen why we can’t wait two weeks. We already have a moratorium of over 10 people meeting,
Mayor interrupts and says local government is exempt.
Henak says that he hasn’t heard why this is essential and how they can support city staff and the mayor.
The question is called. No more debate.
Motion is to refer to CCEC. Fails.
Amendment
Foster makes an amendment to add “in person” to the meetings and strikes the language about a federal, state, county or city emergency. It adds language that includes the chair in the group that could cancel a meeting.
Question called again, no objections
Roll call
Aye: Evers, Foster, Henak, Rummel, Verveer, Abbas
Carter passed and then I didn’t hear. There were 6 ayes and 10 nos. The motion failed.
Main motion
Alder Lemmer says its important to pass this tonight given the current situation, we will have so much bigger fish to fry. Setting expectations and clarity for the public and staff is critical. She doesn’t think it abdicates their responsibility, we can refer items we don’t need to speak on. It’s not perfect but it is a way to respond quickly. It’s important that we take action now.
Mayor asks to speak, no objections. She says the language is absolutely imperfect. They were trying to figure otu if they shoudl re-write or flip it. She says with time and attention they could come up with something better. She asks to vote for it, not just for capacity for IT staff, but for the staff of the of the committees. They have 7,600 emails for absentee ballots, they staff several committees, the minutes come through them, we need people in IT and Public health. Many of the people we re-task will be the ones to help. If you want to repeal this when this is over, she is with them 100% or if they want to amend it in the interim that is fine. She wants to make it clear that we are not just pausing the committees, all her initiatives too. It is her sincere hope that in weeks or months we can take some things off pause and we can have things moving again through the city, for all of us and our residents. We can’t bring everything to a halt forever, but we do need to put everything on pause right now. Nothing is not on the table, there is no committee they won’t consider calling back, there is no issue that they might have to take action on that they will consider. She reminds them that things only need to go through this body. You all, as the council president said, the buck stops with you. Most things that go through boards committees and commissions are advisory to you. Most things will be on pause. They will consult with planning staff and the alder about a development project that comes through. They have instructed staff to let them know if there are critical issues that need to move, alders can also submit items. She says that considerations in her mind are urgent items related to funding they need to spend or items that relate to our ability to get funding. She says that staffing will also be taken into account, IT and committee staff. As we figure out our capacity we can think about other things. When she thought about what was essential. She had a very short list and then a dozen to 20 committees and it is her hope that in relatively quickly they can get to CDBG, CDD, TC and TPPB. They have to make sure they can follow open meetings law, have public participation and have capacity. They will do their best and she hopes this will be short term. She hopes we are all better at technology than we think we are and we will be able to stand up committees. Part of what will help us get back to normalcy is to get city business moving.
Foster says that this is not a resolution, if it were, he would support it. This is an ordinance change that requires all meetings to be cancelled. We could have put forward a resolution, and the fact that we think this is good enough is a concern. He reads an email that I couldn’t type fast enough – she said that this is not a time to pass broad policy changes. We have a history of anti-democratic actions taken in an emergency that result in problems.
Carter asks if they could do a resolution for this, versus an ordinance change.
May says they could adopt a resolution to do this at a future meeting, but we can’t do it tonight.
Carter says that we try to be efficient and perfect in all of our resolutions, sometimes we hit it out of the ball park and sometimes it goes in the catchers mit. What 10 people would we allow. She isn’t thrilled with the language. She is glad they can come back and change it. Although, are we sure we are all going to survive this. This disease believes in equity. It could hit anyone or everyone of us, lets protect ourself and our constituents.
Motion passes.
ADJOURNMENT
Mayor says be well, practice social distancing, wash your hands, drink water, take good care of yourselves.
