No Speakers On Proposed Tax Rate; Attorney General’s Ruling To Change How Reports Are Listed On Agendas

The second public hearing concerning the City of West U.’s proposed $0.36.14 tax rate drew no public comment, much like the first.
Several residents did show up to speak to council, but their concern was the $13.8 million parks bond that will be on the Nov. 4 ballot. All three speakers talking about the bond – Hermann Dobbs and Joe Foster spoke against it, and Susan Ohsfeldt expressed concern on the structure of the bond payments.(see videos for their comments)
The short council meeting held Monday ended on an interesting note, as council and City Attorney Alan Petrov discussed a recent Attorney General ruling concerning council and city manager reports appearing on the agenda. The new ruling indicates that such ‘reports’ on the agenda must be more detailed, to comply with the Open Meetings Act.
The new ruling is meant, in part, to ensure the public knows what is going to be discussed at each meeting. The discussion on the ruling was not on Monday night’s agenda.
“If you are going to have those types of reports on the agenda, the agenda item needs to be specific enough to give the public notice of what’s going to be reported on,” said Petrov, “So, you could have the city manager report…and list two or three things, or 10 or 20, however long he wants to keep talking. We can’t just have a blanket city manager’s report, a blanket council report. The person who goes out and looks at the agenda that’s posted doesn’t really know if they should show up at the meeting to hear about something important… The whole idea is the agenda provides notice of what’s going to be discussed. I am going to end it there, because this isn’t really an agenda item either.”
After a couple of minutes of further discussion, council agreed to put the subject on the next council agenda.