on 4/4/01 10:13 AM, David Brauer at [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > For example, other members and I have asked whether candidates would > re-elect the current council president, Jackie Cherryhomes. No one has > answered yet. Arguably, a council member's council-president vote is the > most important they cast. I'd love to hear answers from current candidates, > with explanations. Feel free to explore various scenarios if that's > important (for example, of you'd vote for likely challengers Paul Ostrow or > Lisa Goodman.) I'm on the opposite side of most issues from the current Council leadership (as you might gather from my website). So, if elected to the Council, I would vote for Paul Ostrow or Lisa Goodman for Council President before I would vote for Jackie Cherryhomes. The real problem is that the Council President has disproportionately large share of power. Many people, including some Council Members, have complained that the City Council is dysfunctional, or even non-functional. One reason for that is the large amount of power held by the Council President -- unless you're on her side of the issue, you can be totally cut out of the loop. Yes, some of this is simply a function of the personalities on the current Council - but the formal powers of the Council President give her a big advantage when it comes to putting together coalitions. It is also unusual that the most powerful policy-maker on the Council is also the person who actually presides over the meetings (unlike the US Senate, for example, where the job of presiding over the body on a day-to-day basis is routinely delegated to the most junior members). As a result, the Council President does not fully participate in the debates over her own policy proposals, because she presides over the meeting. In addition, she has little incentive to debate these issues in public because she can use the powers of the Council Presidency to fashion a coalition on particular issues before the debate even takes place. The outcome, familiar to Minneapolis residents frustrated by City Hall, is that budgets, variances, and ordinances get enacted with very little public explanation or justification. Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Electing Paul Ostrow or Lisa Goodman as Council President will not solve the problem by itself. Perhaps Paul or Lisa could put together a coalition that enacts better policies than Jackie has, but to make City Hall more responsive to the voters, the City Council itself has to become more democratic. The Council itself could begin to make itself more democratic with two simple ideas, without needing a charter amendment. First, the Council should separate the roles of "President" and "presiding officer." The Council President should not be running the meetings, and instead should be prepared to debate her critics from the floor. Second, the Council should adopt a rule that no member can serve more than one 2-year term as Council President -- effectively rotating the Presidency throughout the body. Then no one Council Member could spend term after term accumulating power as Council President. One side benefit of a term limit for Council President is that developers and others dealing with the City would have to negotiate with a much broader cross-section of the City Council in order to accomplish their objectives. As a result, taxpayers and the public at-large won't feel as if development projects were approved in secret - and then these projects might actually have a fighting chance in the court of public opinion. These proposals might not be enough. I am increasingly convinced that structural changes in city government might be necessary - such as the addition of at-large Council Members, or even a strong mayor system. But in the meantime, I think these proposals would make a big difference in how the City Council works. And, unlike a Charter Amendment. these proposals could be enacted by the City Council immediately. Greg Abbott -- Greg Abbott for City Council 13th Ward http://www.gregabbott.org [EMAIL PROTECTED] 612.925.0630 -- _______________________________________________ Minneapolis Issues Forum - Minnesota E-Democracy Post messages to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subscribe, Unsubscribe, Digest option, and more: http://e-democracy.org/mpls
