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LETTER: January 26, 2004 Letter regarding Councilor Lonnell Conley's termination of public comment Clarke Kahlo sent the following letter to the Editor of the Indianapolis Star Spending $1 Million Per Minute-- but with scant public input allowed The January 22nd Public Works Committee meeting lasted only 50 minutes. On the proposed $50 million waterworks bond, the chairman of the committee allowed only a few questions from one concerned Councilor (and rudely dismissed him after he had exceeded his dictated limit of one or two questions). Similarly, he allowed one public comment from the public on the proposed bond authorization. The chairman then pushed through the passage of a do-pass-to-full-council motion (after declining to permit a second attempted public comment). After the meeting, an angry verbal exchange between Councilors occurred in the hallway accompanied by profane epithets. Also during the meeting, the Chairman directly countered the citizen commentator's remark about the need for ample public input by pronouncing that "you CAN have too much public input"! But at a spending rate of a million dollars per minute for this proposed waterworks bond issue-- especially one which encourages urban sprawl into the outlying counties and neglects Indianapolis' needs -- is it good public policy to so severely restrict and discourage public and committee input? We think not. The fact that much of the Council is new and that there are many new committee chairs are not valid defenses for the Council (or any of its committees) to be averse or hostile to public review and input. As long as the committee is named the "Public Works Committee", and as long as it is spending the public's money, then it should be conducted like a public board -- in an open, accessible way. In addition to their base salary, Council members are paid (in public tax dollars) to attend committee meetings, and the committee chairs are paid an additional annual amount (also in public tax dollars) to serve in that capacity. Interested and concerned citizens volunteer their time, often with substantial inconvenience in accessing the City-County Building. If our newly appointed chairs are unwilling to allow the public ample opportunity to present their views on proposed spending programs, they should yield their chairmanships to those who are willing. Or the Council leadership should move quickly to replace them. Clarke
Kahlo
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