This post was contributed by a community member. The views expressed here are the author's own.
Politics & Government
The Temporary Rules subcommittee had no Chair, did nothing for 3 weeks and then met for just 48 minutes with no full review of the rules.
|Updated Sun, Jan 28, 2024 at 12:31 am ET
SUMMARY
Although the balance of power has changed in the City Council, the old guard could easily block vital improvements which are needed for much improved City Council performance. At least two current City Council subcommittees achieved little of value in the last term, and should be retired, and a Public Facilities subcommittee should be created to address the daunting $400 million maintenance backlog for roads, buildings, and the water & sewer system, and to guarantee that projects like the new community center and the emergency dispatch center are successfully completed.
The rules review carried out by the Temporary Rules subcommittee was incomplete at best, and sloppy at worst, and its recommendation for virtually no changes should be rejected, and replaced by a set of changes which the full City Council should settle on after a thorough debate.
In a prior article, it was explained how Phil Ottaviani adroitly captured the City Council Chair even though, with John Stefanini gone, the old guard majority of 6 Councilors was reduced to a 5 Councilor minority. The current old guard is {Ottaviani, King, Leombruno, Cannon, Alexander}, with a potential majority new guard as {Steiner, Mallach, Long, White Harvey, Bryant, Ward}.
Some people object to the use of the terminology old guard and new guard, but it is a very convenient way to identify players in the power struggle going on in the City Council. So, I shall keep using it.
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The old guard wants to ensure that its approach to city government endures, and capturing the Chair was a very significant step toward that goal. The next move by the old guard is to block any change in the way the City Council operates, and that means derailing any attempt to alter its rules, which among other things govern which subcommittees operate, how many Councilors serve on them, what their missions are, and how they report back to the full City Council.
Here are the current rules governing the City Council:
https://framinghamma.gov/DocumentCenter/View/48664/City-Council-Rules-101723?bidId=
At the start of each new City Council term, the Chair creates a Temporary Rules subcommittee to review the rules and report back to the City Council with recommendations. Having engineered his ascension to the Chair, Phil Ottaviani then used his appointment power as Chair to ensure that old guard controlled the Temporary Rules subcommittee by having 3 of its 5 members belong to the old guard: Ottaviani, Leombruno, Cannon, so the old guard would prevail in any subcommittee vote.
Further, he did not appoint a Chair for the subcommittee and then departed for Aruba for a week at the start of the year, so that the subcommittee could not meet till his return. With that delay, and with no Chair in place to drive setting up meetings and agendas, the subcommittee did nothing for the first 3 weeks of the year.
The subcommittee did finally meet remotely on Thursday, January 25, 2023, for just 48 minutes before Phil had to leave again for some other meeting. There will be no further meetings of this subcommittee, so its recommendation to make no changes to anything, except adding Ethics to the Rules & Ordinances subcommittee title, will be presented to the full City Council next week.
This was a very strange meeting, as the expectation was that the subcommittee would work its way through the current rules document, systematically reviewing each section, so that the final recommendation to the City Council would be thorough and complete, with a document showing the suggested changes.
But there was no systematic anything.
The current rules document was one of the meeting materials, but was never looked at in the entire meeting. It simply seemed that with the long delay, no preparation for the meeting due to the lack of a Chair, the meandering nature of the discussion, the lack of reference to the rules document, and the rushed nature of the meeting, the no change outcome was inevitable and a pre-ordained win for the old guard.
The contrast between the rules review process for the City Council and the School Committee is so huge that it bears looking at to show the yawning chasm between their two standards for review.
When I served on the School Committee and co-chaired its subcommittee reviewing its rules at the start of its first and second terms in 2018 and 2020, the process was much more comprehensive. The School Committee chair gave the subcommittee a detailed charge to guide its review, and the entire rules document was reviewed top to bottom. That also included sketching out a long term agenda and providing guidance for professional development for School Committee members.
Here is the updated 37 page rules document produced by the recent meeting of the School Committee Rules & Administration subcommittee review on January 22, 2024, in a meeting which lasted about an hour and a half:
https://www.framingham.k12.ma.us/cms/lib/MA01907569/Centricity//Domain/81/2024/Guidance%20for%20Rules%20and%20Administration%20Subcommittee%202024%20-%20Google%20Docs.pdf
That meeting can also be viewed here:
https://www.framingham.k12.ma.us/cms/lib/MA01907569/Centricity//Domain/81/2024/01.22.24%20Rules%20Sub%20Zoom.mp4
For contrast, the City Council Temporary Rules subcommittee meeting of January 25, 2024, can be viewed here:
http://vod-framingham.cablecast.tv/CablecastPublicSite/show/3059?channel=1
The amazing incompleteness of City Council subcommittee rules review is emphasized by a rapid reading of the current City Council rules document, which shows how poorly organized and sparse it is, and how different subcommittees have quite different operating constraints. The document has no index, runs to just 16 pages, and while some subcommittees can only consider matters referred to them by the City Council, others have no such constraints. [It seems that prior new term reviews were conducted as poorly as this recent one.]
But most amazing of all is the performance data on City Council subcommittees over the prior City Council term. While some subcommittees, such as Finance, seemed to hold sway over most City Council business and met constantly, two subcommittees seemed to do nothing which could not be done just as easily by the full City Council.
The Education, Library, Arts & Culture, Elder & Veteran Services subcommittee met 3 times in 2 years for a total of 107 minutes. That subcommittee is ripe for retirement. The full City Council could cover its functions easily.
The Economic Development & Housing subcommittee met 5 times in 2022 for a total of about 3.5 hours, and 5 times in 2022 for a total of less than 2 hours. That subcommittee is ripe for retirement. The full City Council could cover its functions easily.
Retirement of these two subcommittees would free up City Councilor time to support creation of a Public Facilities subcommittee to address the daunting $400 million maintenance backlog for roads, buildings, and the water & sewer system and to guarantee that projects like the new community center and the emergency dispatch center are successfully completed.
A great deal of the workload of the Finance subcommittee could be very efficiently moved to that new subcommittee, so that investments in infrastructure and capital projects could be properly prioritized and managed, and the City Council fully informed, before the money end of the picture is reviewed by the Finance subcommittee.
Finally, the City Council persists in having multiple 3 member subcommittees, which kill collaboration between members of such subcommittees, as any two of them cannot meet for coffee and chat on their subcommittee topics without breaking the Open Meeting Law. Ironically, an individual member of a 3 member subcommittee can meet and chat with any other member of the City Council on those topics, so long as that other member is not also a member of their 3 person subcommittee. Setting the minimum subcommittee membership to 4 members would fix this chronic problem.
Although the Temporary Rules subcommittee has done such an incomplete job, all is not lost.
The full City Council will decide if there are to be rule changes. Hope springs eternal that the new guard will see the need for change, and improve future operations of the City Council with changes made along the rough lines set forth above.
FLIGHT OF FANCY
Imagine a parallel universe, where the City Council realizes that it is the decision making body, not its subcommittees, and that a comprehensive review of its rules should be done at the start of every new term.