By the Desert Rat
No, you can't come in. We're remodeling.
As promised, here is the second installment of J.H. Habermeyer’s engaging essay on the methods local government uses to dissuade public dissent and protect itself and its undertakings.
The Second Wall
Now that the vast majority of qualified electors has decided to voluntarily to disenfranchise itself, and now that the bureaucrats have thoroughly confounded others with incomprehensible nonsense in form of official reports, studies and agenda materials, we will address ourselves to the most charming scam perpetrated by local government – the charade known as the public meeting.
The meeting itself shall be addressed in the next section. Now I propose to discuss the scheduling aspects of the meeting: the Planning Commission may meet at 1:30 in the afternoon; the County Commissioners may meet at 9:00 in the morning; the City Council may start meetings at 4:00 PM.
Read the rest of “The Seven Walls of Local Government; Wall #2 – Bread or Circus?”
Now you have drifted off course a bit. There are certainly times that public agencies monkey with agendas or meeting times, but that is the rare exception not the rule. It makes for good press to point out how public agencies put a critical item last on the agenda so that it would be heard after midnight – and public agencies ALWAYS want to avoid bad press. I go to more public meetings than most sane people in large part because my profession requires me to do so and I can count on one hand the number of times public agencies have adopted this sophomoric tactic. My experience is actually the opposite, public agencies generally bend over backwards to make sure that the timing of their meetings is as convenient as possible.
Geoff. Having been a resident of Mission Viejo long before you arrived you may not be aware of P&P Enterprises whose Agenda item was not called until 12:30 a.m.
Who and what is P&P anyway?
Oh, prior to that item being called we were negotiating in Closed session with Saddleback Community College to upgrade their baseball field in order to bring the bush League (no pun intended) Riptide from Long Beach to MV under a new name of the Vigilantees. The Agenda verbiage was cleverly generic so that we had no idea was was being approved. If we did not have activists remaining in that city council meeting we would not have connected the dots.
And for some RDA history. The team folded and moved at midnight owing the city over $100,000.
Yes Mr. Howser, another successful RDA story (in MV) that you did not cover.
By the way, good and appropriate use of the word “quotidian.”
Ah man, I use that word EVERY DAY.
Vern. You should forward that word to O’Reilly. I don’t think its in his word of the day vocabulary