The Galveston County Daily News

GALVESTON — In an effort to shorten the length of their meetings, city council members voted to reduce the time residents are allowed to speak during the public comment period from five minutes to three minutes.

Several council members also emphasized the need to shorten their own debate, a move that could include invoking the Roberts Rules of Order limits on the amount of time each member can discuss a single issue.

According to the parliamentary guidelines, each member should speak only twice, for no more than 10 minutes, on each agenda item.

Council meetings now include open debate and back-and-forth conversations between members and city staffers.

Council members also agreed to begin meetings two hours earlier than the 4 p.m. start time and spend the two extra hours going through the discussion items now relegated to the ends of long agendas.

For Expediency

Only two of the 21 people who spoke during Thursday’s meeting urged the council not to take time away from public comment.

“We’re all in this together,” former council member Jackie Cole said. “You need us to support your positions. We need you to hear our concerns. It’s not fair to punish the public because your meetings are long.”

Listening to public comment is an important part of the council’s business, but the meetings need to be streamlined, Councilwoman Linda Colbert said. Colbert and Councilman Tarris Woods sponsored the move to reduce the public comment time, a change not meant to be punitive, Colbert said.

“Keep in mind that the council meetings are designed for us to handle the business of the city,” she said. “We need to do that in the most expeditious manner possible.”

Thursday’s meeting, like most others, stretched past 11 p.m.

‘Forced Efficiency’

Colbert, Woods, Mayor pro tem Danny Weber and Mayor Lyda Ann Thomas all voted in favor of the time reduction. Council members Karen Mahoney, Elizabeth Beeton and Susan Fennewald voted against it.

Fennewald, who frequently leaves meetings early, said the issue gave her mixed feelings.

“Jackie Cole is one of the few people who has five minutes worth of useful things to say,” she said. “Most people come with one issue in mind and could shorten it to three minutes, I think.”

Thursday’s public comment lasted for about an hour, and few people used their full five minutes, Mahoney said. Cutting off the public won’t save much time, she said.

Although most council members, and even City Manager Steve LeBlanc, agreed the change wouldn’t save much time, they all said they wanted to do anything they could to shorten the meetings.

Streamlined Workshop

Later in Thursday’s meeting, LeBlanc tried to persuade the council to return to the workshop format abandoned after Hurricane Ike came ashore last year.

The council used to hold workshops between noon and 5:30 p.m., a format a majority of council members favored.

But they did not want to return to the practice of discussing issues in workshop and rehashing later them for the television cameras, most said.

“There’s no sense in doing the thing twice,” Weber said. “We need to streamline ourselves. Either we set a time limit on each of us or we limit time of the entire meeting. Whatever we have to do, we need to start limiting ourselves.”

Woods said he planned to put a proposal on next week’s agenda to force the council to use the parliamentary debate restrictions of two 10-minute speeches for each council member.

The workshop meeting the council finally agreed to will start two hours before the regular meeting, will be held in council chambers and will be televised.

The council will use the time to tackle discussion items, which often get passed over at the end of meetings now in favor of adjourning.

But since most of the long meetings don’t include the discussion items, the new format might not get the council home any sooner.