Tuesday, June 11, 2013 the appointed board of managers of the El Paso Independent School District voted unanimously to limit public access to address the board during their meetings. I wrote about that in No comment allowed.
Watching the video of the meeting I learned that:
The proposal came from both the superintendent and the board of managers. The superintendent has helped make it more difficult for the public to take exception with his actions. The only path of appeal that I know of when someone disagrees with the superintendent is to bring the issue to the board of managers. We previously had a superintendent that had the auditing function report to him and not the the board — look what that got us. Now our interim superintendent has made it more difficult for the public to bring attention to his actions.
The new policy also forbids those few members of the public that get to speak at the board meeting from using the names of students and employees as well as the positions of the employees. So if you want to speak about the superintendent you might refer to him as the person sitting three positions to the left of the the president of the board.
No show for show
The board member that is also the chief financial officer of the City of El Paso was absent during that vote. According to the El Paso Times the chief financial officer was opposed to the agenda item.
Why was she late? Was she too busy? Did she want to avoid the issue? Does she have time to do her job on this board?
If she was opposed to the issue, why didn’t she ask for reconsideration of the item? If she really felt strongly about the issue why did she remain silent?
Posturing
Maybe her statement to the Times had a different motive. Her boss at the city is considering moving to Florida. The Times ran an article this year about how she might be a good candidate to become the next city manager.
Claiming to oppose shutting down public comment while not taking action to preserve it is just plain grandstanding in my opinion.
It looks like this board now ranks worse than the elected board of trustees as far as public access is concerned.
Eternal vigilance is the cost of liberty.
Cato
elpasospeak 