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.