Another City Council Meeting Cancelled
The Helotes City Council meeting scheduled for Thursday, June 24, 2010, has been cancelled.
In an article I posted to this website back in February, entitled “Do We Have a Part-time City Council?,” I commented that it seemed that a pattern of cancelling Council meetings was emerging. I now think it has become a pattern carved in stone, business as usual.
The Helotes City Council is supposed to meet on the second and fourth Thursdays of each month, but they have met only once a month since last October, except for March when they did meet the regularly-scheduled two meetings. That means that in the past 9 months they have had only 10 meetings, instead of the normal 18.
City staff assures us that the meetings were cancelled because there was no City business to discuss. But I ask now as I asked before, is there really nothing going on in our City? Is there really nothing happening that our elected Council members need to know? Are there really no decisions required of them?
I still feel, as I expressed in my February article, that there is less to bring to the attention of Council members, and thus to the public, because the Mayor and/or the City Administrator have frequently been authorized by Council to negotiate, or execute, or resolve, or administer and oversee, or implement, or expend budgeted monies.
Council members are routinely giving the Mayor and the City Administrator the authority to “handle it,” whatever “it” is. While I’m sure that is infinitely more convenient and less labor intensive for the Council members, it also means that there are fewer eyes reviewing what’s going on and fewer elected officials doing their due diligence by overseeing the City’s business.
Is anyone but me wondering 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.
Maybe I’m the only one who sees a problem here?
Since thousands of citizen volunteer hours were eliminated by this mayor and his council in 2008 when they disbanded most of the citizens’ committees, our city is being run by the Renaissance Man, himself, and his lemings-off-the-cliff council. People are too stressed and too busy to care, since the council does an adequate job of window-washing and making themselves look good. All is probably well for now, but, whenever the recession/depression decides to ease up, look for our town to be ravaged by junky development like the CVS shopping center and the one down by Compass Bank. Good luck, Helotes!