Council Takes Cue From Cinderella

Costa Mesa’s Monday night City Council meetings get under way about sunset, but Mayor Donn Hall complained that this year’s meetings all too often have not let up until nearly sunrise--about 12 hours later.

To limit the meetings’ length, Hall and his fellow council members have voted to impose a curfew to keep them from running past midnight.

“We had to have some kind of guideline to end the meetings by 12 because it is unfair to many people to have them wait till 5 in the morning to speak,” Hall said Thursday.

“If a meeting lasts until 5 in the morning, most people can’t last that long, or they’re so tired they can’t present their case properly.”

Under Monday night’s vote to stop meetings from running past midnight, the council will reconvene at 6:30 p.m. the next day to take care of unfinished business, Hall said.

Special meetings will be called when public hearings are expected to be lengthy.

A random survey of other cities that have been plagued with lengthy city council meetings shows that Huntington Beach recently adopted the curfew approach, while Irvine has discarded its curfew as unworkable.

In Huntington Beach, council meetings routinely last past 12:30 a.m.--sometimes as late as 1:30 a.m. On one occasion, the council did not vote until 3 a.m. after a public hearing on a proposed redevelopment plan.

So, the Huntington Beach City Council, which meets on the first and third Mondays of every month, recently passed a curfew under which any agenda item that is not introduced before 11 p.m. on the night of its meetings will automatically be continued until the next council meeting.

City Councilman Wes Bannister, however, said Thursday that this time limit has not been strictly enforced.

“That’s why I leave at 11 p.m.,” he added.

In Irvine, the council met until 1:50 a.m. Wednesday before finally deciding to go forward with a plan to convert an animal shelter site into housing for homeless people. The council postponed a decision on whether to convert a kennel at the site to shelter the homeless.

Such a lengthy meeting would not have occurred under the council’s former curfew policy, according to City Clerk Nancy Lacey. “Under the curfew policy, the City Council would stop at 11 p.m. and decide to go on only to those matters it could finish by midnight.”

Lacey said the curfew was abandonned several years ago: “There was just so much stuff on the agenda that needed to be addressed. If it was put off to other meetings, that was of no help, because it just caused agenda items to back up, and meetings to get even longer.”