Our Town:The said and the unsaid ... Our Town:The said and the unsaid ... (January 28, 2004)

by Bill D'Agostino

What was unsaid was, in many cases, more interesting than what was said during a Palo Alto City Council retreat last Saturday.

The meeting touched on all the procedural issues that been have bug-a-booing city officials over the past year and a half, from the way to ask questions to the appropriate use of e-mail.

But underneath it all, some officials seemed to be using the informal get-together to bring Councilwoman Yoriko Kishimoto and Hillary Freeman in line with their way of thinking -- although not their beliefs about policy. Those officials want Kishimoto and Freeman to stop bugging staff so much, and stop using their decision-making in a way that is so blatantly political.

"These are shared expectations," Interim City Attorney Wynne Furth said of the protocols under discussion. "Things go better if you follow them."

For most city councils, approval of the "consent calendar" -- the items at the beginning of the meeting that are thought to be cut-and-dried, and are approved typically with one swift vote -- is fairly routine.

This City Council, though, has had little in the way of shared expectations in recent years.

The consent calendar is supposed to allow the council to "focus on the issues of the day," elsewhere in the agenda, City Manager Frank Benest said. But the majority of the council felt that Kishimoto and Freeman were taking too much time away from those big-ticket items when they decided to fully debate a number of consent calendar items last year. So the council decided to require two council members rather than just one as in the past to take items off the consent calendar.

Even if an item stays on the consent calendar, council members would have three minutes each to say why they voted no on an item within the calendar. City Clerk Donna Rogers said they can also submit written explanations for the permanent record.

Kishimoto wondered why she would do that since that statement would not go into the minutes. "What would be the benefit of that?" she asked.

This seemingly innocuous question gets at one way Kishimoto and Freeman have irked their colleagues. Some council members feel that the two councilwomen are more interested in being political than setting policy.

In other words, the two would rather convince the public (when they later cite "the record") than convince their colleagues.

This undercurrent could be felt again during a discussion about another touchy subject -- council member's e-mailed questions to staff.

If you want to get something on the record you have to ask it at the meeting, Kishimoto said, explaining why she and Freeman occasionally ask the exact same questions during meetings that they had asked by e-mail the day before.

Some council members feel Freeman and Kishimoto are wasting staff's time with their voluminous requests for information. Assistant City Manager Emily Harrison said Saturday that although there is a rule saying those requests can only take an hour, often that limit is exceeded by city employees hoping to put concerns aside about their topic.

Another supposed time-waster is when the two ask to amend council meeting minutes. The council's minutes are not a word-for-word account of what is said but a paraphrasing.

Rogers recommended that council members limit their requests unless there are factual errors. Councilwoman LaDoris Cordell, who was just sworn-in this month, asked if the council had ever decided to not accept lengthy changes to the minutes.

"The council has never had the balls to not accept the changes," Councilman Jack Morton said.

Now OK, that was a fairly interesting thing said during the meeting -- but I bet it won't show up in the minutes.

E-mail a friend a link to this story.