I was interested to see what happened with item 1C on last week’s city council agenda. I watched the video but never could find where they even mentioned it.
The minutes of the city council meeting should be able to tell me what happened so I have been waiting to look at them. Item one on this week’s (July 2, 2013) agenda seeks the approval of those June 25, 2013 minutes. The problem is that the minutes themselves are not posted as backup material.
That means that according to ordinance 17616 city council must either table the vote or take a special vote declaring that failure to take action would be detrimental to the interests of the city. Failure to do so is an ethics violation.
Item 1C would have changed that. I wrote about the proposed new ordinance in Testing the newbies. It would remove the requirement for a special vote to proceed with the item and change the direction completely by just allowing council to either table the item or proceed as though nothing went wrong. The failure of city staff to provide the proper backup material would no longer force council to take a special vote in order to proceed. Given events of recent years, this has already proven to be a very bad idea.
From what I can tell item 1C was removed from the agenda because it was sloppily done. The title of the proposed ordinance indicated that the new ordinance would replace ordinance 17016. Ordinance 17016 created the capital improvements advisory committee.
Evidently someone caught the error. The item is now back on the agenda indicating that ordinance 17616 would be repealed, which is the old ordinance that dealt with putting items on the agenda.
The item this week is an introduction of the ordinance. Next there will have to be a public hearing. Then council can vote to approve the new ordinance.
The problem is that the backup material that was filed with the municipal clerk on June 27, 2013 still proposes to repeal 17016, not 17616. They will need to start over again even if council is inclined to vote for the new ordinance.
They might claim as they have in the past that the mistake is a scrivener’s error, which according to Wikipedia is “a phrase which can also be used as an excuse to deflect blame away from specific individuals, such as high powered executives, and instead redirect it to the more anonymous clerical staff.”
In my book we should expect the city attorney to produce accurate, fair work. The city parliamentarian could catch this for us, but — you guessed it — the city parliamentarian is the city attorney.
We deserve better
Brutus
elpasospeak 
Let’s make and sell t-shirts that read: Scrivener Did It.
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Should the image be two faced?
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