Do We Have a Part-time City Council?
The regularly scheduled Helotes City Council meeting that was to be held yesterday, Thursday, February 24, 2010, was cancelled.
I would guess most of you would say, “So what?” City staff would probably just have assured you, as they have done me in the past, that no meeting was required because there is no business to discuss.
On the surface, this is nothing to be alarmed about, but when you consider that our Council has only met once a month in each of the last 5 months, to me that gets more alarming, and it seems a pattern is emerging.
The Helotes City Council is supposed to meet on the second and fourth Thursdays of the month, but they met only once in October, once in November, once in December, once in January, and now once in February.
Is there really nothing going on in our City? Is there really nothing our elected Council members need to know? Are there really no decisions required of them?
I suspect that there is less to bring to the Council members, and thus to the public’s attention, because many of the agenda items brought before Council are worded to authorize the Mayor to negotiate, or execute, or resolve, or administer and oversee, or to authorize the City Administrator to implement, or expend budgeted monies, or negotiate and execute.
Council has routinely been giving the Mayor and the City Administrator the authority to just ‘handle it,’ whatever ‘it’ is, and these issues are never discussed in public again.
I hope I’m worried about nothing, but I do wonder what’s going on that we, the voting public, don’t know about. Fewer committees, fewer Council meetings, and less citizen involvement can only lead to less transparency in our City government and less accountability for our elected officials.