Tommy Washbush / Freepik
A time lapse of a clock with the City of Madison Common Council logo on it.
Every few years Madisonians discover that their city council has long meetings. Hands are wrung. Brows are furrowed. Proposals for reform abound.
And nothing changes. Nothing changes because, ya know what, nothing really should. The kids on the council are alright.
The latest iteration of this angst played out on the pages of the morning paper a few Sundays ago. Mayor Satya Rhodes Conway — no slouch at extending meetings herself when she was on the council — scolded her colleagues thusly: “You could collectively try to refocus your agendas on the policy issues that matter to this community, which frankly is not what you spend most of your time talking about in these meetings,” Rhodes-Conway told them at a recent meeting.
Yeah, well, maybe.
But the truth is that most really long meetings in my tenure as mayor from 2003 to 2011 were caused not so much by council debate as by public testimony. Sometimes that’s about a big — even international — issue. One of the longest meetings I can remember was when a council member had the bright idea of creating a sister city relationship with Rafah. That sparked a passionate debate over Gaza because Rafah was seen by some as a gateway for arms and supplies for Palestinian fighters while others saw the proposal as creating solidarity with the Palestinians.
Other times the issue was hyper-local. One of the things that tended to turn out a lot of people was when we wanted to retrofit a neighborhood with sidewalks. The older neighbors had raised kids who survived into adulthood without sidewalks and they didn’t want to pay the special assessments now that the danger had passed. Younger families tended to want the sidewalks for the safety of their offspring. Controversy ensued.
If public testimony is still the cause of most long meetings I’m not sure what can or should be done about it. I suppose you could cut back on the time each speaker is allotted, but that would only go so far. (We’re a city of professors, both literally for some and in spirit among everyone else, and so we’re programmed to speak for 50 minutes at a time.) It’s a democracy. People have a right to speak their truth to all that power arrayed before them on the Madison Common Council.
Another reform that could be tried — but won’t be — is to change the committee structure. The Dane County Board, on which I also served, is almost twice as big and yet has a tradition of much shorter meetings. That’s in part because issues at the county level tend not to inspire that much public testimony. But it’s also because controversies often get worked out at the committee level.
All of the key county committees are populated exclusively by supervisors. Madison has a lot of committees and most of them have a majority of citizen members. As a result, fewer council members are involved in the committee process and so, more issues get hashed out on the council floor. Another thing alders spent a lot of time on when I was mayor was asking questions of city staff. They were often the kind of questions that, in most legislative bodies, are dealt with in committees.
But again, this isn’t going to change. Madison has a long tradition of mixing elected alders with citizen-appointees in its many, many committees. (The number of committees may be reduced, but most of the reduction would come from committees that have been lightly used in any event.)
The real question is why any of this matters. So, yes, from time to time the council meetings drag on into the wee hours. I remember one time when the meeting ended only because the municipal court needed the chamber — at 8 the following morning. That meeting had started at 6:30 p.m. on the previous day.
But does that really matter? I don’t think so. The argument that people make poorer decisions late at night is true at State Street bars and among long-haul truck drivers. But alders usually know how they’re going to vote when the meeting begins. It’s just a question of letting everyone say what they’re going to say, even if it has already been said.
The long city council meeting is a time-honored Madison tradition. It’s like having a brat on the Memorial Union Terrace on a summer evening. It’s like strolling around the farmers’ market. It’s part of the culture of that institution, and I would argue even of the city itself, and there is no reform that is going to change it.
The best idea? Brew some coffee.
Dave Cieslewicz is a Madison- and Upper Peninsula-based writer who served as mayor of Madison from 2003 to 2011. You can read more of his work at Yellow Stripes & Dead Armadillos.
