At the opening dinner to the Sammamish City Council’s retreat Jan. 19 at Hotel Murano in Tacoma, facilitator Andrew Ballard alerted council members that the focus of their 2017 retreat was slightly different from years past, shifting in focus toward policy governance and managing meetings.
“Our weekend is about governance process, trying to help both council and staff be more productive and get to bed earlier,” Ballard said.
Ballard was aware that late council meetings was a sore spot among council members and staff. Prior to the retreat, he had conducted interviews with each council member.
Before engaging council members in retreat exercises on Jan. 20, he stated his role was to help them develop overarching procedures to become more effective and productive. One of those ways was working with a timed agenda, which Ballard was doing for the retreat, and being able to move off an item when the council couldn’t reach a resolution, potentially sending it back to a committee, a study session or another meeting.
“If we don’t have parameters around time management, then you will continue your meetings well into the next morning, which I understand frustrates a lot of people and happens with some regularity,” Ballard said. “One of the things we want to do is stop that from happening.”
In a brainstorming session on council strengths and weaknesses, council members noted a lack of time constraints at its meetings, particularly with long public comment periods, as an area where time management could be improved.
“This year particularly, I think we’ve struggled with the concept of openness to the public,” Councilmember Kathy Huckabay said, noting the council has experienced public comment periods of two-to-three hours. “So much time is taken up for public comment and I recognize we have to balance that because if you have three hours of public comment, then you’re well into a midnight or 1 a.m. meeting in order to have sufficient discussion on some of the topics.”
Councilmember Ramiro Valderrama noted the council struggled to address the perception that it doesn’t listen to the public. Other areas of weakness mentioned were the council’s difficulty with coming to a decision or a shared consensus, council comments becoming repetitive during discussions, and council members sometimes straying off topic and toward pontificating instead of engaging in discussion.
Ballard led a discussion on remedies to the identified issues that the council was experiencing, which the council later voted on to adopt. But targeting council problems took far less time than it did for council members to come to an agreement on potential solutions. The council wasn’t immune to some of its identified weakness habits during the retreat, with Ballard commenting on the times when those habits would surface over the course of the weekend.
“This group has a very difficult time prioritizing and making decisions,” he said during one instance. “I think it’s your Achilles’ heel, I really do.”
Among the approved remedies was to eliminate pontification on the council by adhering to the existing rules when council members were responding to public comment. Council members agreed to try and get answers to questions they might have with the consent agenda prior to council meetings to avoid holding up the meeting. Council members approved a suggestion to prioritize agenda items and add times to the agenda as a guidance system. The council also created an ad hoc committee, consisting of Councilmembers Huckabay and Tom Hornish and City Manager Lyman Howard, to develop parameters for public comment.
Reason for comment
Former Sammamish resident Scott Hamilton, author of community blog Sammamish Comment, had an idea for why marathon public comment periods were taking place at council meetings. He shared as much with council members during public comment to open the retreat’s third day.
Hamilton told council members that while they may “complain” about hours of public comment, “You brought a lot of this on yourselves.”
He cited longstanding community issues that he deemed “mismanaged or rife with inaction,” such as stormwater flooding in the Tamarack neighborhood and Sammamish homeowners battling King County over property rights along the East Lake Sammamish Trail. He criticized the council’s handling of projects including the 42nd Street barricade, the YMCA-Pine Lake property and at Sahalee Way.
“If you want to solve the problem of marathon public comment sessions, solve the problems citizens come to talk about,” Hamilton stated. “You’re not doing that on a timely basis and in some cases, you’re not doing that at all—you’re kicking the can down the road.”
