Topic: public comment

A Candidate speaks: On Democracy

September 12, 2008 |

David Cutting is a candidate for Ward 8 City Council. This is his second position paper.

Ward 8 City Council Candidate David Cutting

City Code Section 1-204(c), as copied below, is anti-democracy, and the new members, hopefully including this writer, must vote to repeal it.

A public comment period is conducted prior to each regular session of the city council from 7:00 p.m. to 7:30 p.m.. Any person wishing to address the council shall make such request to the city clerk by noon on Wednesday prior to the regular session and shall submit their name and the topic of said comments. Each person shall be allowed a maximum of five minutes to speak during the comment period. No public comments concerning any zoning amendment to be considered by the city council at such regular session shall be received during this period.

We must encourage, not restrict, resident participation in our city government. It should suffice for persons to sign up for comments between 7:15 and 7:30, as they enter the meeting, and to do so without stating a topic. The council should hear the five-minute comments, in the order in which people signed in, at the end of the regular session. This will help ensure that the public will have the opportunity to address items of current concern, rather than stale issues that may already be resolved. «Read the rest of this article»

Sections: News, Opinion, Politics | No Comments

Meeting adjourned. Now for public comments!

April 28, 2008 |

A cruel joke is being perpetrated upon the public at city council meetings. Actually, it’s a travesty!

For some inexplicable reason, knowledge of parliamentary procedure seems to be in short supply at recent city council meetings. The dubious conduct of meetings and voting sessions has caused some citizens to raise a ‘Point of Order’ regarding the April 24th executive and special called voting sessions. Additional review of the printed and published agendas for those meetings brings a serious question to mind.

Questionable agenda ‘order of business’?

Since the city of Clarksville utilizes Robert’s Rules of Order, Newly Revised as its parliamentary authority, citizens must question how the agenda for any of its public meetings can contain a public comment segment AFTER the adjournment of the meeting. By all generally understood interpretations of Robert’s Rules of Order and every other parliamentary authority manual, adjournment is the conclusion of the called gathering, the point at which all agenda business and discussion has been addressed and decided. How then is the public supposed to impart its input upon the deliberative body that is city council, when the meeting is no longer in session and the people’s representatives are released to leave the gathering? «Read the rest of this article»

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