If the guy really did make a physical threat then he got what he deserved. This is a practical reminder to keep arguments civil and reasonable. More light than heat.
If the guy did not make a physical threat then the city is misusing the legal system to stifle resident dissent. Question: are there citizens that COR leadership would prefer to keep at a 500' distance for whatever reason? While answering this question for yourself you may want to think back on COR hiring an expensive new PR flack to deal with blog posts.
I found this piece interesting:
It also bars Lagos from going near Plano Mayor Phil Dyer and City Manager Tom Muehlenbeck. The order excludes public events, such as City Council meetings, in which Dyer and Muehlenbeck are acting in their official capacities.
I think interaction with public officials about city matters should be handled in public, official events. This helps keep the interaction official (literally related to the public office) rather than personal. It may also assist transparency as it will have a greater chance of being recorded/transcribed.
My preference for this approach is why it bothers me when officials want to take a citizen's concerns to a private venue: phone, meeting, email. It's public business and needs to be handled in public. No drama, no he said / she said, and much less opportunity for misunderstanding.
5 comments:
The guy seems to be as frustrated with the dealings in Plano as we are in Richardson. The appellate appeal will be an event to attend.
"I think interaction with public officials about city matters should be handled in public, official events. "
I want to discuss the practical ramifications of this approach, laudable as it may be.
In Richardson, from time to time, people come up and ask questions at Council meetings. Often, they are shocked that they don't get an immediate answer. I can think of two good reasons why they don't get immediate answers:
1. Someone will go have to look up some information to find the answer, and we're not going to stop a public meeting just so that can happen (i.e., don't inconvenience everyone else who happens to be there waiting for things that are actually on the agenda).
2. In order to accurately and correctly answer the question, the staff or Council would have to educate the requestor on quite a bit of background so that they can even understand the answer.
OK, let's start with the gentleman who came recently to state that it was "unethical and immoral" to pay for unused sick leave. Actually, as we found out at Unused Sick Leave, it's not only a common practice in municipalities, but for police and fire, it's required by State Civil Service rules (for cities that adopt them). At the meeting, were the staff members aware that other cities do it? I am sure they were, but could they name names off the top of their heads? Probably not. It was an item that need some research, which, indeed, was no doubt communicated with the requestor when the mayor (or someone) talked to him later.
Now let's take more difficult cases. A resident who does not hide his disdain for the City government (he calls it "a gang of well-entrenched thugs" among other unpleasant things) comes to Council and announces to them that they are breaking the law by discussing the City Manager's compensation in executive session. Well, the City Manager is pretty sure that the Council is not violating the law and says so, but the resident will have none of it, because, afterac all, he has read the first few paragraphs of the Texas Open Meeting Act and thinks he understands it. Clearly, when you look at the link I provided above, he had no idea what the Act actually said in toto or that there was an Attorney General opinion on this specific issue, showing that the City was right and the resident wrong.
So what was the City Manager and Council to do? Stop the meeting while someone hauled out not only the Texas Open Meetings Act so that the entire Act could be read to him word by word, but also crank up the online database search for Attorney General opinions and hope you can quickly find a relevant letter? That would be nuts, because it would be a case of stopping the process of conducting public business so that the individual can argue for hours (if you let him) that he is right and the Attorney General is wrong (which I would have no doubt that he would do). Why should we permit this person to have veto power over our elected officials’ ability to conduct public business, by bringing it to a stop just so he could argue?
(continued)
The problem is that there are often questions for which there is no simple answer. There is an answer, but it requires bringing the resident up to speed on a lot of things that I personally don't want to sit through when I attend Council meetings. Think about the female former City Council candidate who came to a Council budget meeting in 2009 to berate the City staff for not writing a budget that a housewife can understand. We were stunned to hear this from a supposedly professional woman...what was the Council and staff supposed to do, stop everything and give her the equivalent of a degree in accounting so that she could understand a normal $172 million budget? She might as well have asked her doctor why medicine isn’t simpler so she can understand it…there’s a reason why doctors and accountants and a lot of other professionals spend years studying their crafts.
You know, I am all in favor of people understanding how the City works. I know that the director of the Finance Department has repeatedly expressed disappointment that I seem to be the only citizen who actually calls him to ask questions - other residents seem to prefer to just show up at Council and ask questions and make accusations based on total misunderstandings of how the City operates.
It would be great to answer questions right then and there...but I hope you understand why this just can't be done much of the time. If you have ideas on how to better educate the public before certain members show up to ask unanswerable questions and make baseless accusations, I'm all in favor of hearing them...
I am not trying to be argumentative, but the problem cannot be solved by just always answering the question right then and there. And what do you do with the people who have personal agendas and are much more interested in accusing people of being criminals (here and here for other explicit accusations of criminal behavior) rather than actually advancing the public business?
Bill
I appreciate your input.
I do not think that "handled in public" necessarily equates to "right then and there." I do understand the practical and legal constraints in play at council meetings.
I was trying to make a broader point about appropriate interaction with public officials; specifically that one ought not stalk them.
I do disagree with reason #2. It is not the job of the public official to make the citizen understand the answer; only to answer it reasonably. The asker or the rest of the public can mull over the meaning of the answer and judge its propriety.
IANAL, but if if someone suggested my behavior were illegal I'd stop the behavior and do a bit of due diligence to make sure I was in the clear. Then proceed or change my ways accordingly.
As a layman I do understand a great deal more about medicine than city politics.
"specifically that one ought not stalk them."
I quite agree. I also think that it's rude - not to mention libel (really, read the civil statutes) - to falsely accuse city officials of illegal behavior. And worse (to this Texan's sense of propriety), the libelers don't even apologize to the officials when the libel is proven beyond a doubt to be false.
"It is not the job of the public official to make the citizen understand the answer; only to answer it reasonably. The asker or the rest of the public can mull over the meaning of the answer and judge its propriety."
Unfortunately, there are too many citizens who have no intention to mull over the meaning of the answer - they are speaking out solely for the purpose of impugning the reputations of public officials, even if their statements are blatantly (and often deliberately) false.
This whole process would work better if these residents would ask "is such and such illegal?" rather than "you should resign because you are breaking the law!" (yes, I have heard this very statement at the Richardson City Council). The constant barrage by certain residents with comments that all public officials are criminals really is quite wearing for any person, so you can imagine that when this kind of speech graduates to talk about hand grenades (I think that what brought this on in Plano), I can perfectly understand why the officials there decided that they needed some more formal protection.
Bill
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