THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, October 2, 1994 TAG: 9410010129
SECTION: VIRGINIA BEACH BEACON PAGE: 06 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Editorial
SOURCE: Beth Barber
LENGTH: Medium: 52 lines
You win some: City Council decided last week to move informal briefing sessions from the Council chamber into the conference room behind it - and, praises be, not only to keep up the good work of televising them but to add a regular briefing session between 4 p.m. and 6 p.m. on the third Tuesday of every month (except July) when Council holds no formal session.
Setting up cameras in the conference room will cost about $44,000. That may sound like a lot; and truth to tell, if these sessions were pay-per view, they'd probably pay for themselves in, oh, 25 years. But making these briefings more readily available and accessible to citizens is, as Councilman John Moss noted, a more useful, defensible ex-pen-di-ture, and for sure a greater contribution to participatory de-moc-ra-cy, than the school system's $42,000 flagpole.
The public is invited to the conference room, as is the press, and may even find a chair. Neither is invited to speak: These sessions ``shall be for the purpose of discussing matters of interest to the Council, and receiving briefings/reports from the city manager, city staff and city boards, commissions, committees and other city agencies.''
In fact, citizens aren't invited to speak before Council unless the session is a public hearing, or they address items on Council's agenda, or a Council member has sponsored and scheduled remarks on a non-agenda item. No doubt this system gives Council time to research the subject of a speaker's remarks. No doubt it keeps the confusion quotient down. Helps keep the rabble - and the rabble-rousers - out, too.
Abuse from the citizenry is a crummy problem, for which Chesapeake's City Council just approved (and the Beach's School Board recently rejected) an even crummier solution: turn off the TV cameras before the time allotted for any old citizen to speak about any old thing, and when a handful of disrespectful regulars usually pipe up. But it's not democracy's fault if only curmudgeons participate. And is it not democracy's duty to provide the opportunity?
Most Council members probably figure he hears enough abuse on his home answering machine. For the Beach Council to give, say, 10 citizens three minutes apiece of that third-Tuesday briefing time to speak of whatever they please might seem an invitation to public humiliation. Maybe. But British prime ministers have survived question time for years, some even thrived on it. The privilege of participation can be governed by abuse-and-lose rules to keep appearances short, civil and infrequent - and, at least on third Tuesdays, get everybody home for dinner. by CNB