Mayor’s Quick Gavel Called Out of Order

Before he was appointed mayor last year, Andy Fox vowed to wield an unforgiving gavel, keeping council meetings orderly and to the point.

He has certainly lived up to his lofty promise, cutting in, however impolitely, on both residents and council members when necessary to ensure that the sessions do not careen out of control.

But Fox’s tough stance has spawned some criticism lately from residents who think he is too brusque and sometimes slams the gavel down mid-sentence when their speeches go a little long during the council’s public comment period.

In a raucous scene earlier this month, Howard Blau, a resident of the city’s posh North Ranch neighborhood, refused to exit the speaker’s podium after Fox ordered him to, and defiantly continued to talk.

Blau said he decided to confront Fox not only because he believed his wife, Hallie Blau, had been rudely treated by the mayor while at the podium some weeks before, but because he thought the restrictions were unfair. He was eventually escorted out by police.

At last week’s town hall meeting at Cal Lutheran University, residents criticized Fox for his council manners. And colorful gadfly Ekbal “Nick” Quidwai, whose running diatribe, “Watergate in Thousand Oaks,” is a staple of any city meeting, reminded Fox that faster is not always better.

“Mussolini ran the trains on time” and “Hitler was a very efficient man,” Quidwai said. But democracy, in his view, requires a little more public participation than Fox was allowing.

Fox has strongly defended his actions, saying he knew that running the meetings more smoothly would anger some people accustomed to gabbing endlessly without interruption. He did not return repeated phone calls asking for comment Wednesday.

But not all council members agree with Fox’s approach.

“There is a more friendly way to run meetings and allow residents to speak,” Councilwoman Elois Zeanah said. “I’ve gotten calls from residents who say they are intimidated to speak before us, and that is a terrible thing to happen.”

Zeanah said she understands the need to keep meetings from dragging past midnight, as they have many times in recent years. But restricting the comments of residents who often take their time to carefully write speeches explaining their positions is wrong, she said.

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Councilwoman Jaime Zukowski also believes Fox has crossed the line. How can public input be a part of policymaking, she argued, when that input is muted?

“I think it is essential that public participation be preserved and nourished,” said Zukowski, who wielded the mayor’s gavel last year. “There is a great level of frustration in the community that public input is being reduced. I fear that people will feel that their opinion does not matter anymore.”

Zukowski also said residents have complained to her about the council’s new policies on public comments, which restrict the time residents can speak depending on how many people want to comment.

Under the policy, the more residents who want to speak, the less time each resident receives. The changes were instituted in September on a 3-2 vote, with Zukowski and Zeanah dissenting.

“It seems to me that if 20 people show up to speak on an item, that item is more important than one that only five people show up for,” Blau said. “Why should the five people get more time than the 20 people?”

Councilman Mike Markey said the shortened speaking limits are necessary to keep the City Council moving forward.

“The issue is that we’re there to have a meeting in public,” Markey said. “It’s not [entirely] a public meeting. If people spoke for five minutes about every item we considered, we’d never get anything done.”

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Markey said that many times, 10 or more speakers come to a meeting to say the same thing, and that sometimes means a person with a different opinion has to wait hours to make a point. He said Fox should be commended for having the courage to do the right thing, knowing that he will ruffle some feathers in the process.

“In some cases, the mayor has had to do what he had to do,” Markey said. “Unfortunately, some people have refused to get off the podium when their time was up.”

Winifred Meiser, a resident who has been openly critical of Fox’s public comment policy, said the mayor could make his point more tactfully. Typically, he issues a warning when the time is nearly up, but if the speaker continues, he grows stern or pounds the gavel. Residents will stay away from council meetings if there is a possibility they will be treated impolitely, Meiser said.

“Maybe it’s a well-intentioned overreaction, ‘Nothing like that is going to occur under my command,’ but it comes off poorly,” Meiser said. “We’re not children, and he needs to come off more like a diplomat.”