The Backstory: In 2010, I have set a goal for myself to experience one new thing per week, every week of the year. Each week, I try something I’ve never done before, and then I document my experience here, regardless of whether I succeed or fail. Read more here.
Week: 26
The Challenge/New Experience: Attend a City Council meeting.
I’m a little late with filing my report this week, Dear Reader, so my apologies to you for that. This week on Tuesday night I attended a Burbank City Council meeting. I think this one will have to go into my book with a star next to it, though, because I didn’t make it through the whole thing.
How many of you have ever attended a local government meeting? I’ll tell you what my biggest surprise was — the Burbank City Council meetings, or at least the one I attended, lasts about five hours. I really thought it was going to be closer to two hours, maybe three if there was a lively agenda.
My documentation is a little sketchy this week also. I didn’t want to be snapping pictures during the meeting, of course. I wanted to record a little audio but the batteries in my digital recorder were dead. They are always dead when I need them.
However, here is a photo of the Burbank City Hall building, taken from their Wikipedia entry:
Also, here is the agenda from this week’s meeting. And! If you’re really ambitious, here is archived video of the meeting I attended. It’s five hours and 38 minutes long, but hey, this is a long weekend, right? What else have you got to do? For some reason it starts with a couple of lite FM numbers, but the meeting is eventually on there.
So, I got there a little before 6pm to attend the meeting, only to find they had an awards ceremony that evening and the regular council meeting wouldn’t start until 6:30. Not a big deal. A little after 6:30, the meeting began. The boring details are after the jump, keep reading if you dare.
I direct you to Item 1 on the Agenda: CONDITIONAL STREET VACATION (V-384) AND PURCHASE AND SALE AGREEMENT (APPLICANT AND BUYER – WESTWIND PROPERTIES, LLC).
Here’s what this is about. Westwind Properties wants to buy up part of a street, close it off and create what they’re calling a “campus” around their particular building. The City stands to make some money here (although not that much, sounds like they’re selling it at pretty rock-bottom prices), Westwind will be doing some improvements on that block — on the surface, it sounds like a win-win.
Problem of course is that it will be blocking off access on that street now, and some of their neighbors receive deliveries from wide-load trucks, and the only other access is an alley to the rear. So the neighbors are not pleased with this idea and they came out to the Council meeting to say so. Mayor Reinke announced that she had 23 comment cards for the public hearing portion; each person is granted five minutes to speak.
That’s 115 minutes, folks. I didn’t do that math in my head. Instead, at 8:15, I looked at my watch and realized I’d been there for just over 90 minutes and we were still on Agenda Item #1, and I realized there was no way I was sticking around for the rest.
So I left, and I went home to watch the rest of it on TV (well, most of the rest of it). It’s not quite the same, but at least I got a decent look at local government in action, such as it was. I do intend to go again, but next time I’ll get dinner first, and I’ll be prepared to stay there until it’s over. And next time maybe I’ll make sure there’s something on the agenda that is of interest to me personally.
Hey, I am halfway through the year! 26 more New Things to go!
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