Need for Change Dawns on City Council Nighthawks

Running time: Five hours, 10 minutes.

It is longer than a double feature, or a Dodger game with extra innings, and roughly the amount of time it would take you to drive from here to Las Vegas. But this is not a movie date, a ballgame or a road trip.

This was last week’s meeting of the Ventura City Council. And, as those meetings go, it was a relatively early night.

In recent weeks, Ventura’s council meetings, which start at 7 p.m., have lasted as long as six or seven hours, as bleary-eyed city leaders have argued well past midnight before an empty room.

The council’s reputation for making policy decisions at hours when most Ventura residents are sound asleep has become so established lately that it is the butt of jokes.

“I was going to write a speech [before addressing the council] tonight, but I thought I’d do it between 11 p.m. and 12 a.m.,” Planning Commissioner Ted Temple teased last week.

Even council members are making wisecracks about their late-night decision making.

“It’s kind of like an NBA basketball game,” Councilman Ray Di Guilio quipped last week. “You can get all the action you need in the last two minutes.”

But some city leaders are concerned that the council is compromising its ability to make sound decisions when meetings are allowed to run so late.

“They are tired, they are cranky, they are potentially irritable,” Councilman Jim Friedman said of his colleagues. “I just don’t think that is the best venue for important policy decisions.”

Tonight, Friedman plans to ask the council to direct staff members to study steps other communities have taken to shorten meetings, such as placing time limits on council members or establishing a set hour for adjournment.

Beyond their own sleep deprivation, members worry that the meetings are a drain on city staff members who must stay until the bitter end--without overtime pay--and a frustration to citizens who often wait for hours to speak on an issue.

But how to streamline the meetings is a point of contention among city leaders, who attribute the late nights to a heavy workload and political grandstanding.

“Between January and June is a bummer,” Mayor Jack Tingstrom said. “Everything hits, because that is the end of the fiscal year. . . . I think what you are going to see in the weeks ahead is that it is going to go faster.”

In the last seven weeks, the council has tackled a series of complex issues such as the city’s $49.5-million 1996-97 budget and public hearings on the annual Ventura Keys assessment.

City Clerk Barbara Kam said she has tried to keep the agendas light, stacking as few items as possible on the docket when complicated or controversial issues are going to be discussed.

But it doesn’t always work, particularly when public speakers and council members begin debating an issue.

Take last week as an example.

For the third time in about as many weeks, the hot topic was a proposed ban on skateboards, in-line skates and bicycles on sidewalks in downtown Ventura. Eleven speakers came to the podium to speak on the issue. Their combined comments took 24 minutes.

Then the council started to talk.

Councilman Di Guilio orated for 14 minutes--more than half the time used by 11 public speakers. His colleagues collectively went on for another five minutes.

As mayor, Tingstrom says he has tried to keep the council comments to a minimum. He knows that the gabbing, grandstanding and occasional infighting is not healthy for the panel or the community.

“We know that there is a concern out there,” he said. “We are addressing it.”

The board adopted new policies for public speakers a few years ago, limiting citizen comments to five minutes or less depending on how many speakers are in the audience.

No such rules apply to council members, however, who are simply encouraged to keep their remarks to a minimum.

“There is a need to have council meetings not stretch out into the wee hours of night,” Di Guilio said. “Unfortunately, it is very hard to control a public meeting that includes council members feeling a need to express themselves.”

He admits to being in that category. “As a person who talks more than he should, I understand that we all need to be held accountable,” Di Guilio said.

In his 19 years on the seven-member board, Councilman Jim Monahan says he has never seen a group that likes to express itself as much as this council does.

“This is by far the worst as far as people grandstanding, as far as people talking on and on and on,” he said. “We never rattled on like this.”

Ventura’s marathon sessions are getting so bad, some say, that the council has fallen into the same league as the Thousand Oaks City Council, notorious for meetings well past midnight before officials decided to curb public comments.

Other cities--such as Oxnard, Simi Valley and Camarillo--have taken steps to limit public comments to three minutes to keep meetings short. Some have started meetings earlier and agreed to halt their session at 11 p.m., unless the council votes to continue.

“We have done certain things to streamline our meetings,” said Marilyn Thiel, Camarillo’s city clerk. “There is not any way a city council can control the timing of meetings entirely.”

But some Ventura officials are willing to give it a try. The first step will be Councilman Friedman’s request tonight for a staff study.

“I imagine it will get mixed reactions,” he said.

Councilman Steve Bennett has also suggested placing a limit on the council members. Elected officials often forget how long they have been talking, he said.

“If they would just put three-minute time limits on us, I think that would help,” he said.

“We shouldn’t be making important decisions when we are fatigued at midnight. I think it is a problem.”

Councilman Gary Tuttle is frustrated as well. But he questions whether time limits or adjournment deadlines will cure the problem.

“I know there are thoughts out there about limiting council members by time. It all sounds good on paper, but council members want to get their word in,” he said. “I think the way you stop it is, you don’t elect those type of people.”