Democracy in Action
Jun. 20th, 2008 10:28 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rhuLast night at 11pm, instead of watching The Daily Show, I walked over to Newton City Hall to watch the Board of Aldermen in action.
Why, you may reasonably ask, was the BoA starting a meeting at 11pm? Long story short,
The budget process in Newton works like this: The mayor submits a budget proposal to the BoA. The BoA has 45 days to vote on it; if they don't, the mayor's original proposal becomes law by default. (Kind of a reverse inverse pocket veto.) The deadline to act on the budget was last night at midnight.
Tuesday night it looked like after weeks of wrangling, a failed Prop 2 1/2 override, and lots of testy aldermanic meetings, they were almost ready to vote, and the vote was going to be "no." So minutes after NewTV's coverage cut off at midnight, Alderman Coletti rose and announced that he was "chartering" the budget, and asked for three others to stand and join him.
You see, according to the Newton charter, the first time an item comes before the board, any single member can table it until the next meeting. This happens immediately, without a vote. If three others join in, then the item is tabled until the next regular meeting; a special meeting cannot be called. So Ald. Coletti and his three friends immediately prevented the budget being voted on before the deadline, and the mayor's original budget will take effect. (Had it gone to a vote and gone down, then the budget process would have started all over again.)
There was an objection from Ald. Parker that it was too late to "charter" the item, which the chair overruled and the meeting was adjourned amidst much confusion before the chair's ruling could be challenged.
Seeing that this was coming, Ald. Sangiolo called a special meeting to discuss a related measure. Since special meetings require 48 hours notice, the earliest that meeting could be was 11pm last night. Everyone knew that at that time she would move to challenge the chair's ruling from Tuesday night. If the challenge passed, they'd have about half an hour left before the deadline; clearly at that point they'd vote the budget down, the mayor would resubmit it (presumably with those amendments that had already passed the BoA in the resubmitted version), and the 45-day clock would start over.
I felt strongly that the BoA should know that the citizens of Newton were aware of the dirty tricks that were going on, and that we were watching, so I walked over to City Hall and arrived just before the meeting started. There were about 20-30 of us in the gallery. There was the expected posturing on both sides, and a rollcall vote that went 10-9 in favor of upholding the chair's ruling from Tuesday night, with 5 absences. So the "good guys" lost by the slimmest of margins, but at least now we have ten names to vote against in the next general election.
And it just reinforced what I learned at LSC: Whoever knows Robert's Rules best wins the day.
Why, you may reasonably ask, was the BoA starting a meeting at 11pm? Long story short,
The budget process in Newton works like this: The mayor submits a budget proposal to the BoA. The BoA has 45 days to vote on it; if they don't, the mayor's original proposal becomes law by default. (Kind of a reverse inverse pocket veto.) The deadline to act on the budget was last night at midnight.
Tuesday night it looked like after weeks of wrangling, a failed Prop 2 1/2 override, and lots of testy aldermanic meetings, they were almost ready to vote, and the vote was going to be "no." So minutes after NewTV's coverage cut off at midnight, Alderman Coletti rose and announced that he was "chartering" the budget, and asked for three others to stand and join him.
You see, according to the Newton charter, the first time an item comes before the board, any single member can table it until the next meeting. This happens immediately, without a vote. If three others join in, then the item is tabled until the next regular meeting; a special meeting cannot be called. So Ald. Coletti and his three friends immediately prevented the budget being voted on before the deadline, and the mayor's original budget will take effect. (Had it gone to a vote and gone down, then the budget process would have started all over again.)
There was an objection from Ald. Parker that it was too late to "charter" the item, which the chair overruled and the meeting was adjourned amidst much confusion before the chair's ruling could be challenged.
Seeing that this was coming, Ald. Sangiolo called a special meeting to discuss a related measure. Since special meetings require 48 hours notice, the earliest that meeting could be was 11pm last night. Everyone knew that at that time she would move to challenge the chair's ruling from Tuesday night. If the challenge passed, they'd have about half an hour left before the deadline; clearly at that point they'd vote the budget down, the mayor would resubmit it (presumably with those amendments that had already passed the BoA in the resubmitted version), and the 45-day clock would start over.
I felt strongly that the BoA should know that the citizens of Newton were aware of the dirty tricks that were going on, and that we were watching, so I walked over to City Hall and arrived just before the meeting started. There were about 20-30 of us in the gallery. There was the expected posturing on both sides, and a rollcall vote that went 10-9 in favor of upholding the chair's ruling from Tuesday night, with 5 absences. So the "good guys" lost by the slimmest of margins, but at least now we have ten names to vote against in the next general election.
And it just reinforced what I learned at LSC: Whoever knows Robert's Rules best wins the day.