At the March 22 City Council meeting, I proposed a rule regarding transparency — the Council should only act on items in our published agenda. The rule would reinforce important guidelines that already exist in Robert’s Rules of Order, though shunned by this Council a number of times. The added value of the proposed rule is in requiring six votes to bypass agenda transparency, not just a simple majority.
I honestly felt the motion had a viable chance for unanimous support. While this has certainly not been a harmonious Council term, I have heard every current Councilor speak to the urgency for transparency.
For the Council to take significant action without the essential details in our published agenda prevents critical awareness for all stakeholders. The public cannot provide input on anticipated actions. City staff are ill-prepared to provide quality advice. The full group of City Councilors has little time to be informed before voting.
The most impactful example of our current City Council acting without the required transparency was a few weeks into the term. The ripple effects of those actions still hang over us like a relentless storm cloud.
On Jan. 28, 2020, the agenda for the special meeting simply listed “McIntyre Project” as a discussion topic. Moments after the Mayor’s opening remarks, a surprise motion was made to deny the McIntyre ground lease. Neither this specific topic nor any suggested motion was included in the agenda. The ground lease document itself – around which the action revolved – was not in the public meeting packet, it was only in a Council-privileged email. For a project that was focal to our last election and central for the term that followed, residents had no access to this important document. City staff and Councilors (at least a number of us) were surprised to be faced with this vote before earnest efforts to cooperate with the City’s development partner had been given a chance.
The meeting minutes show what transpired from there. A slim 5-vote majority prevented the City Council from even hearing legal advice the City Attorney implored us to consider. The motion to deny the ground lease passed, an action which had the predictable consequence of inspiring a lawsuit from Redgate Kane.
If we had the transparency rule at that special meeting, four votes could have prevented acting without legal advice. Instead we have been burdened with mounting legal and development costs and a veil of “non-public” surrounding McIntyre processes and taxpayer impacts. Because of the lawsuit, a Council who was voted in to revisit McIntyre did not even engage a new public input process until a full year into the term.
Ripple effects from those Jan. 28 actions may be growing into waves. Lately we see legally fraught disagreements about viable timelines for a revised project. Subcommittee members point to an encroaching election 7 months away as reason to aggressively short-circuit the review needed for such a complicated project.
There are other examples of this Council discarding transparency because five votes allowed them to. Earlier this year, the Mayor made a non-agenda motion to spend $50K on signaled crosswalks rather than other neighborhood safety projects awaiting in the CIP. Or recently on March 15, if our four votes had been empowered by the transparency rule, decisions on the Middle Street bike lanes could have at least respected our Right to Know laws. Instead, five votes acted on an email that Councilors only received a couple hours before the meeting. That email was not shared with the public until a week *after* the actions were taken.
In voting down the proposed rule last week, Mayor Becksted was joined by the reliably supportive Councilors Kennedy, Huda, Whelan and Trace. Admittedly, as the Herald quoted the Mayor, “we don’t really have to abide by [the transparency rule]…we can discard it.” True indeed; but just because you can does not mean you should.
While I don’t have nearly the years of service as our current Assistant Mayor, I have gained valuable perspective since my own time serving in that post. In any of our temporary roles in the longer arc of Portsmouth, it is important to scrutinize how we govern. When shortcomings are revealed, to fulfill our sworn duty is to be vigilant about improvements.
Whether for the remainder of this term or as a note of caution to future City Councils, I trust that the people of Portsmouth see the fundamental value of transparency for healthy government. The principle speaks far more loudly than the five votes against it last week.
Cliff Lazenby is a Portsmouth City Councilor. The views expressed are those of the writer.