Council President Rivers opening can of worms?

Besides removing the initial public comment section at Council meetings, Plainfield Council President Bridget Rivers' proposed rules of order for 2013 provide that the public has no right to expect on-the-spot answers to questions posed to the Administration, nor should Council members comment on the public's questions.

Instead, President Rivers proposes that the Robinson-Briggs administration be given an opportunity to answer the questioner in writing within some unspecified length of time.

Over the years, I have come to appreciate the time of public questions to the current administration and the answers given.

The call-and-response has given Administration members, who are supposed to have the qualifications necessary to execute their respective offices, an opportunity to show off their chops, demonstrating that they understand their responsibilities and authority and are in touch with the personnel, day-to-day issues and conduct of business in their respective bailiwicks.

When well done, these public back-and-forths have had the sense of satisfaction that comes from watching a tennis match well and skillfully played.

Not only does the new proposal provide an escape hatch for the Administration from facing the public, it emasculates the Council's conduct of the public's business.

More than this, Council President Rivers may have opened a costly can of worms.

A things have stood up to this point, the questions asked and answers given have been part of the public record. They are recorded and can be listened to by any interested citizen (and, theoretically, viewed on the public access channel if the Robinson-Briggs administration ever gets around to posting the previously taped meetings).

Under Rivers' proposal, the answers would be severed from the questions, without any specific guarantee that -- if and/or when issued -- they would become part of the public record for that meeting. Barring that, how would the public come to know of the Administration's answers?

Does the asking of a question at a public meeting create an obligation on the government's part to make the answer available as a public record?

Would the Municipal Clerk have to transcribe each and every question and post same to the city's website with the answers generated by the administration? Would this be unfairly burdensome to the Clerk's office?

Would the failure of the Administration to answer the questions, or not make the answers available as a matter of course as part of the public record expose the city to liability if challenged?

These procedures seem to have been conceived in haste, and we all know what haste makes.

OTHER SURPRISES AND NON-SURPRISES

• What accounts for the sudden reappearance of Mayor Robinson-Briggs, who has boycotted Council meetings for months? Surely it can't be that she expects to be given the floor at meetings at which she is only a guest, especially in light of Council President Rivers' assertion that there will be 'no grandstanding or campaigning' at Council meetings.
  
  
• Councilor Storch and Corporation Counsel nominee Minchiello crossed swords over why the city was relying on a no-bid contract to designate the City Engineer for 2013 instead of open public bidding as required by an ordinance the Council passed last year. Minchiello asserts the ordinance does not comport with state law, and the Robinson-Briggs administration feels itself under no compulsion to award contracts in any way other than it always has.
  
  
• The Council will now be faced with paying Mayor Robinson-Briggs' legal tab for the WBLS investigation, something it had declined to do when Robinson-Briggs' allies were in the minority.
  
  
• When resident Jeanette Criscione asked what was behind the removal of trash cans from downtown streets and whether the PMUA's shared services charges would be correspondingly reduced, she was greeted with puzzlement from the Council and administration. But was I imagining that I read in a recent PMUA newsletter that 51 trash cans had been removed because businesses and residents were using them improperly? And if the PMUA did put out such a story, why can't it be found on their website?
  
  
• The sleeper surprise (to me) came in the discussion of the resolution setting interest rates for delinquent tax payments. Part of the discussion involved revealing that as of the first of the year, Plainfield no longer has a Tax Collector. When talk turned to catching up on checks that had been received but not posted to the electronic accounting system, Director Restaino casually remarked that at the time of posting, a clerk could simply date the payment with the date it was actually received, thereby negating any interest charges or penalty owing to a technical 'late payment'.
  
  This seemed innocent enough, but it did occur to me in a flash that if a clerk could do this when it was justified, what would prevent a politically-connected taxpayer who was late with a payment from having the payment date fudged by the employee?
  
  Can you see a potential for abuse here? Or does the system have protections of which Director Restaino is unaware?
  
  Either way, discomfiting.
  
  
•  Lastly, the surprise statement by Councilor Brown that she didn't know anything about Remington & Vernick or contributions by the firm or its members to her campaign. More on that later.

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-- Dan Damon [follow]

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