Max the visiting cat could not care less that the screen behind him was blank, asking the user to wait until the city council came out of its closed meeting Monday.
Always striving for transparency, the Albany City Council could do something to further that cause by making a change concerning its executive meetings, which shut the public out.
On Monday, the council spent nearly two hours on routine topics during its virtual work session, held via Zoom. Then it went into an executive session and spent the better part of the next hour behind closed doors — turned-off computer screens, actually — to talk about labor negotiations. It invited the public to wait until the screens would be live again.
I learned about this because I was using my wife’s computer to follow the meeting. As a consequence, Zoom didn’t know I was a reporter who is normally allowed, by state law, to sit in on executive sessions.
During normal times, when meetings are actual and not virtual, the audience is ushered out of the room during executive sessions and told to wait outside until they’re called back in.
Why would anyone wait very long for a council meeting to resume? Because sometimes the most interesting developments are the unscheduled items that come up last, when each member has a chance to bring up anything of interest or concern. Sometimes these are newsworthy, and that’s why reporters hang around.
But Monday night, the council resumed its regular meeting for just a couple of minutes and then adjourned. None of the members had anything to say.
If the council wanted to be considerate of the public it is always encouraging to attend, it would schedule executive sessions not in the middle of regular meetings, but before the official starting time or at the end. This simple change wouldn’t cost anything, But it would avoid insulting the audience by telling them to get lost for a while and cool their heels.
A more fundamental change would be this: Discuss things in public except in very rare circumstances. Labor relations? Why can’t the public be told what the unions want, or that there’s an impasse, or an agreement, or whatever else the situation is? (hh)
This is the message people watching the council meeting got during Monday’s executive session.
Sssshhh, we’re supposed to enjoy being told what to do, what to think and when to do it.
Your suggestion is too practical for politicians to grasp
“Alley” a walking passage once upon a time. In the eastern city of my childhood, it was a service-way for deliveries, trash/garbage pickup , hucksters, as well as a play area in a residential neighborhood.
You meant to send this comment in response to the alley story, not this one, right?
LOL
HH
Yes
Got disoriented in the sea of ads
Easy fix! I would always change the agenda to have the executive session be after Business from the Public and the City Manager report. So if there was no action needing to be made from executive session, then the meeting adjourned. The public didn’t need to be hanging on waiting around an hour to go back into regular session, like we did last night.
By the way Hasso, your cat looks just like my old Bernie who passed away in December. Orange cats are the best!