City Council “agenda setting”
City Council’s long-awaited “agenda setting” retreat (the sequel to the abandoned “visioning” process) is tomorrow morning (Saturday, July 19) from 8 am to 1 pm, at the Municipal Services Center.
Like all City Council meetings and work sessions, this is a public meeting; I have no idea how much “public” we will see.
We’ve been getting a lot of input from citizens who have ideas about what the City’s agenda should be, and I hope we’ll have time to discuss those ideas (plus ideas of our own). The agenda looks like it might be heavy on facilitation and DVDs, and a bit light on interaction (I do hope I’m wrong about that):
8:00: Welcome and Opening Comments
8:15: Introduction: Who Raised the Bar? Driving forces Creating the Turbulence. Sandy S. (facilitator)
8:45: Feedback from Council…Emerging Themes from Council Input {Open Discussion}
Break:
9:30: Group Decision Making Process and “The Abilene Paradox” brief DVD
10:00: The Growth Curve…a model for understanding the stages and phases of change as applied to:
• The Community
• City Staff
• City Council Leaders
Group discussion on “where we are” before discussing “where we are going.”
11:00: Break
11:15: Leaders as Change Agents “Mission Critical” DVD Lessons from NASA for Oak Ridge {Group Discussion}
12:00 Lunch
12:45: Where do we go from here?
• Remaining focused amidst 27,000 customers
• Determining our priorities
UPDATE (August 11, 2008):
We’ve had two agenda-setting sessions now (the one on July 19 was followed by a second session on August 2), and we’re still not where people wanted to be (another session will be scheduled), but progress has been made.
One thing that Council members seem to agree on is that we don’t have nearly enough opportunities to discuss. Open meetings laws prevent deliberation on city business outside of announced meetings and work sessions, and interactions during formal meetings and work sessions are inhibited by various factors. At meetings those inhibiting factors include long agendas, parliamentary procedure, the physical layout of the courtroom where Council meets, and the presence of TV cameras. At work sessions, interaction is limited due to the fact that most of the scheduled time is devoted to formal presentations — there’s seldom enough time for everyone to ask all of their questions about the topic, much less discuss it among ourselves.
As a result of the realization that we all want more discussion, in October we will try out a new procedure of having a pre-meeting work session (Mayor Tom Beehan is calling it a “caucus”) one week before the regular meeting to discuss the items on the agenda for the following week’s meeting. The first such session is scheduled for October 13, 2008, one week before the October 20th meeting.
