It appears that at least 30 minutes of the December 6, 2007 Northampton City Council meeting were staged and deliberations were conducted in bad faith, with the vote's outcome prearranged.
During that time, the Council voted to amend a resolution they'd only just approved at the last meeting, a resolution to form a best practices oversight board. Seeing no conflict of interest, they wanted to remove language that barred currently sitting members of city boards and commissions from sitting on that board.
An email from councilor-elect Bob Reckman leaked to Daryl LaFleur's blog, Northampton Redoubt, on valleyadvocate.com, suggests that Reckman worked with five sitting councilors, including David Narkewicz and Marianne LaBarge, to have the amendment presented, and that he'd made certain there were five votes to pass it. He ends the message with, "I am not worried about its approval and plan to watch the meeting on TV from the comfort of my home." (A link to the audio file from the City Council deliberations is also on the blog post.)
The audio is disturbing on many levels. None of the councilors Reckman contacted mention the discussion that took place between city councilors before the vote. Marianne LaBarge argues for the amendment as if it were her own, and as if she's uncertain how the vote will go. David Narkewicz makes a show of compromise by accepting the amendment to his resolution when, in fact, both the resolution and amendment are his own.
Even without the revelation of the behind-the-scenes machinations, the arguments offered by councilors Marianne LaBarge and Maureen Carney betray an alarming misunderstanding of basic civics. The proposed structure for the best practices oversight board already allows for three of its seven members to be city councilors. If the other four seats were occupied by members of city boards and commissions, there would be no room for members of the public at large and much potential for undue influence and conflict of interest.
"I know there have been all these discussions about trust, but we're all members of the public," Carney said, arguing that volunteer board members—like the city councilors who will sit on the best practices oversight board—could be their own checks and balances. "Even though we may be serving public office… most of us have a day job, and this is something else we do. We're not generally fulltime employees of the city."
City councilors are not members of the public, but public officials. Volunteers on municipal boards are often chosen by public officials, such as the mayor or councilors, and work closely with them, making such volunteers less than ideal for providing oversight.
"I have to agree with what I'm hearing from Councilor Carney," Marianne LaBarge followed up. "I think if I was on boards… you're there as a volunteer, you attend all the meetings for years and years, and you read that language and it just seems very hurtful. We have a lot of residents in the city who are on commissions and boards, and they do an excellent job, and I don't think they deserve that language."
Far from being a dirty word, public oversight is fundamental to democracy, and effective oversight can only come from an independent entity. It's alarming that the idea is so foreign to the Council, and worse that they're offended by it.
Trust needn't have entered into the discussion, but given Reckman's email, perhaps it's more pertinent than ever. The email shows councilors rigging a vote prior to meeting, then making a mockery of the deliberation process. The councilors have likely violated the open meeting laws, and certainly the voters' trust.
This year, City Hall has presided over the loss of many of Northampton's cornerstone public places—the Green Street neighborhood, Pulaski Park—to private enterprise, and now comes this crystal-clear explanation. It's not that city hall doesn't care about the public; it's that they're not certain what the public is.
