Via The Virginian-Pilot:
The Portsmouth City Council is holding a community meeting at 7 p.m. today at Woodrow Wilson High School, 1401 Elmhurst Lane.
The council holds a community meeting every four months to hear concerns from residents.
Wow. What a novel concept! Listening to the people.
Meanwhile, Norfolk is holding a council meeting today – at 2:30pm 😦
VIVIAN J. PAIGE | All Politics is Local 
Novel concept indeed! And note that in Norfolk, with those pesky 2pm meetings, next week’s Council meeting is slated to be even worse. From today’s agenda overview:
“Change of the meeting start time for September 28, 2010
If approved, this ordinance will change the start time of the September 28, 2010 City Council meeting from 7:00 PM to begin at 9:00 AM on September 27, 2010 to permit time for the Annual City Council Planning Session.”
Now that’s darn convenient huh? And of course this annual planning session will be private and closed as always.
I believe that is the retreat. And I thought retreats were open to the public?
Yes. The retreat. My understanding is that they were technically a closed session and not open to the public. But I’m certainly ready to be corrected if I’m wrong on that.
Nonetheless, a Monday meeting at 9am is even worse than a Tuesday meeting at 2pm. Seems to me we need all meetings to be at a time when most citizens can attend. 7pm seems fair. All televised is even better. And an agenda and supporting documents that come out much sooner than the few days afforded now. Note that the supporting documents for today’s meeting are still not online.
Whoops … correction … docs are there now. There were not yesterday. Too little, too late I think. JMO.
Council Members Moody and Whitehurst deserve credit for being the “patron saints” of the concept and agitating for it until it came into existence. The idea was to bring government to the people. Unfortunately, over time those attending have become a collection of “the usual suspects”, myself included, who speak at city council meetings. Would that more “first-timers” came out as they did in the beginning.
Maybe more would come out if they didn’t wait until the day of the meeting to have it announced in the paper?
Am I simply not jaded enough yet in that I personally feel like three community meetings with residents per year is too paltry an effort to be worth commending?
Hey – three is better than none 😦
On the subject of the Norfolk City Council Retreat, I received the following email reply in response to a question to the Council on it:
” You inquired about the upcoming city council retreat. It will convene at 9 am on Monday, September 27 at the Attucks Theatre. It is open to the public. If the retreat includes a closed session that, of course, would not be public.
Breck Daughtrey
Clerk of the Council”
That confirms what I thought.
Thanks Vivian. That’s why I wrote them and sought the answer. I hate assuming anything, so I posted in haste originally I think.
On the other hand, I am still concerned with both the time of the meeting and the fact that it has not been announced to the public. Other than it being on today’s Council agenda, who would know?? And when will the matters to be discussed be announced? Friday late, like usual? How do citizens get involved without knowing? Just bugs me. After all, this retreat/planning session is an annual event well known to the Council. Why do they wait to the week before to ask for an ordinance to change the meeting time and place for it? Why not have the date, place and time for it on the original posted schedule in January? And why not solicit public feedback and participation?
Actually, there has been mention of the retreat in the paper several times. That’s how I knew what the the agenda change meant. They probably just forgot that they needed to change the ordinance.
With the election this year, they probably couldn’t schedule the annual retreat. But I agree: they should be able to schedule it in advance in non-election years. And yes, I’d like to see them encourage public participation of some kind. (I believe that while the public can attend the retreat, they cannot participate, like the informal council sessions.)