Loren Zemlicka
The sun set and rose over Lake Monona during a particularly long city council meeting. A city committee is looking at ways to shorten meetings.
Shortly after Mayor Lucius Fairchild convened the first Madison Common Council, he started to worry. The council meetings were going on for far too long into the night and the council seemed to create a new committee every month. He launched a study.
Okay, so I’m making that up, but I doubt it’s too far from the truth. Madisonians have been complaining about the plethora of city committees and the length of council meetings ever since I came here as a UW student in 1979 and who knows how long before that. Going on about these things is like talking about the weather around these parts.
And guess what? A new generation of city leaders has discovered the problem again. And a city committee is studying the problem. If past is prologue, look for nothing to happen — and that’s just fine with me.
Of course too many council meetings drag on for way too long and, of course, the city has way more committees and commissions than it needs, but that’s just a reflection of who we are. We are a city of professors and bureaucrats. We have meetings. We study stuff. Efficiency is just not in our DNA. Deal with it.
My favorite tale of a long council meeting was one where we started at 6:30 p.m. as I watched the light fade from the windows at the back of the council chamber. Thirteen hours later, I saw the light come back as the sun rose over Lake Monona. We were then thrown out as municipal court had to convene at 8 a.m. Saved by the judge. Who knows how long the council would have soldiered on had they not been dismissed by the need to dispense justice for parking violators.
And, as for committees, Madison has over 100. There’s so many that nobody is actually sure of the precise number.
City Attorney Mike Haas has suggested a few things that might be done to shorten the meetings. Nice try, but I doubt many would work very well even if they were implemented.
But I did serve on the Dane County board — a body twice the size of the council — way back when and I don’t recall meetings going on so long as a rule. So, I shot an email to Scott McDonell. McDonell has spent the last couple of decades in county government, first as a supervisor, then as county board chair and now as county clerk.
McDonell confirmed that the board’s meetings tend to be a lot shorter and he offered a couple of observations on why that might be.
Probably the most important factor relates back to the committee structure. At the county, all the important committees are populated exclusively by supervisors. As a result, most things are worked out at the committee level and the full board consideration is mostly a confirmation of what has been decided there.
By contrast, city committees are made up predominantly of citizen-members with just a sprinkling of alders. The only exceptions are the Finance Committee and the council’s own internal governing committee. The result is that much of what gets to the council floor hasn’t been vetted much by council members themselves. A lot of details and questions that are more appropriate for committee work end up getting ironed out in full council meetings.
McDonell’s other observation is that council members often use question time for staff as de facto debate time. I observed this myself when I presided over meetings as mayor. It was routine practice for alders to use city staff as satellites, bouncing questions off of them that were designed not so much to elicit any real information as to make a point to their fellow alders.
I think McDonell has provided the road map for improvement, but there’s zero chance it will be followed. Restructuring committees to include only alders runs against the grain of the democracy riot that is Madison government. It’s just not going to happen.
(You can make a good argument that it would actually be more democratic to kick citizens off committees. You would have greater accountability with elected officials making decisions instead of unelected citizens with their own agendas. That’s a strong argument that falls on deaf ears. I know. I’ve tried it.)
And getting alders to discipline themselves in their questions to staff is asking them to change their DNA. They couldn’t do it if they wanted to — and they don’t want to.
One thing that would make sense, and which the council might actually do, is to take all public testimony at the start of the meeting. Right now, it’s spread out so that the public has to wait until their item comes up in the agenda, which can be in the wee hours. Just let the public have their say at the start and let them go home. (Actually, even the current rules allow the public to testify either at the start of the meeting or when their issue comes up, so if the council didn’t want to require all testimony at the start they might just make it a point to make sure the public knew it has that option.)
But as for Madison’s excesses in committees and length of meetings, we should actually view that as just the price we pay for a healthy democracy. People show up because they think they can fight city hall and win sometimes. If the result is some bleary-eyed alders, well, that’s a small price to pay.
