(4th in a series of posts on City Government)
O, my, look what Gadfly found!
Browsing through the Morning Call archives.
(Ok, not quite normal, but how do you spend your spare time? Watching television?)
Gadfly #1 Stephen Antalics Oct. 22, 2005, bemoaning the reduction of public comment time at Council meetings from 12 mins. to 5 mins.
12 minutes! 12 minutes each!! A paradise for gadflyers!!! Now lost. Forever. Sigh.
(I call Stephen Gadfly #1 for his two decades of service, Bill Scheirer is close by at Gadfly #2. I am a Johnny-come-lately, a pretender, a usurper — not worthy of the Gadfly title. But I need a number. Maybe Gadfly double-zero: “Gadfly00.”)
Could there ever have been a time when 12 minutes was allowed??
Gadfly00 understands that there was a time when only 2 or 3 minutes was allowed. A time when throats dried up and tongues shriveled.
Thank you, Stephen, for fighting for the public’s time at the microphone. As you still do.
But this discovery of the Golden Age of Gadflying leads Gadfly00 to make three requests:
1) that when you have something longer to say, you think of the Gadfly blog as your vehicle (cf. the recent invitation to candidates for elected office to “use” us as a platform, but this could apply to any topic you want to explore)
2) that you pass the word about the Gadfly blog to the kind of serious, thoughtful type of audience members Gadfly00 aspires to, so that good ideas, provocative ideas can have the widest possible reach and impact (Gadfly has several hundred followers now, but we are a town of 75,000)
3) that you help the blog achieve necessary balance by posting oppositional views and/or encouraging others to do so (Gadfly has been criticized for leaning one way)
Gadfly00 encourages you to contribute, promote, criticize.
There was actually a time with no time limits on speakers at City Council meetings.