Comments on: A Few City Council Candidate Questions

By: Jerry Gilbert

Jerry Gilbert — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 00:00:29 +0000

I support non-partisan elections for City Council seats. That is how its done in most Michigan cities and i believe we would have a more competitive general election if this was the case.

By: Karen Sidney

Karen Sidney — Sun, 19 Jul 2009 22:20:35 +0000

I’d like to see more openness in the Budget and Labor Committee. I recently filed a freedom of information request asking for minutes, agendas and staff notes for this committee from 7/1/07 through 6/23/09. The only documents I received are emails with a reminder for 6 meetings (4 in 2009 and 2 in 2008). The emails included a list of topics to be discussed. The FOIA response said there were no minutes or staff notes from the meetings.

Because the committee is only 5 members (Hieftje, Teall, Higgins, Rapundalo, Greden) it is not subject to the open meetings act. A start toward improved transparency would be for all council committees to follow the open meetings act by publishing meeting times and location and preparing minutes.

By: Leslie Morris

Leslie Morris — Sun, 19 Jul 2009 18:42:36 +0000

I agree with Vivienne’s three points.

I do not believe that requiring a super majority of council to disagree with a planning commission recommendation would necessarily be in the public interest. Planning commission members, like all other board and commission members,serve as specialists, who spend extra time studying the proposals on their agenda. They are not, however, elected officials directly responsible to the public. They are nominated by one person, the mayor, and are often chosen for their professional background or particular interest. In our democratic system, power is supposed to be exercised by elected officials.

In addition, I believe that such a change would require a charter amendment, which would be difficult to pass, given the problem I have noted.

By: Vivienne Armentrout

Vivienne Armentrout — Sun, 19 Jul 2009 18:08:20 +0000

I like your idea of the council’s bringing operations out of a very closely controlled committee into the public light. However, I’ll note that in practice the first and second reading of ordinances by council does a fairly good job of paralleling the Ways & Means – BOC pair. One simple thing council could do would be to move the public hearing from the second reading back to the first reading, so that public input has some chance of affecting the makeup of the ordinance.

I must also comment that your question to incumbents about how they would replace the time they spend on council business is rather cruel. Let me rephrase it for you: “If a major part of your existence, that you live and breath all your waking hours, is torn away from you by a loss at the polls after a strenuous campaign, how will you compensate for this gap in your life?”

I don’t understand why you think that candidate recruitment should be handled by a ward-and-precinct organization. The number of people involved in any kind of formal party organization is very small and is not representative. A strength of our democracy is that candidates come from anywhere, for many reasons. It would be too bad to see that relegated to a few political functionaries. You seem to be suggesting a primary before the primary.