Santa Clarita / Antelope Valley : Palmdale Council Will Limit Meeting Lengths

City Council meetings that drag into the early morning hours, leaving officials bleary-eyed and outlasting the hardiest City Hall gadflies, are finally coming to an end.

The council voted Thursday night, in a meeting that lasted until nearly midnight, to impose an 11:30 p.m. curfew on future meetings. If the council cannot complete all of its business by then, the rest of the agenda will be handled the next night.

“We need to give the public an opportunity to feel better” about how the city’s business is conducted, said Mayor Jim Ledford, who helped spearhead the change after getting fed up with meetings that sometimes lasted until 1:30 a.m.

Under the change, the council’s regular meeting, usually held on the second Thursday of each month, will shift to the second Wednesday. Leftover business will be handled the following night. The regular meeting times will remain at 7 p.m.

With the city grown to a population of nearly 90,000, and council agendas containing as many as 50 items, the new policy probably will result in frequent second night meetings. But the council rejected an option of instituting regular twice-monthly meetings.

A Times survey found Palmdale is the only city of its size in Los Angeles County to hold city council meetings only once a month. Most cities of similar size have two regular monthly meetings or more.

Councilman David Myers was the only council member to publicly favor switching to two regular meetings a month, citing his own survey in which 74 of 79 cities utilized that practice.

“Does the rest of the world know something we don’t?” Myers asked.