Column: Who will be the next president of the Bloomington city council, and does it even matter?
If the 2024 edition of Bloomington’s city council can get through its first two calendar days without violating Indiana’s Open Door Law (ODL), that will be an improvement over the group that was sworn in four years ago.
On Jan. 2, 2020, two days after taking office, the nine-member city council gathered in the backroom of a downtown Bloomington bar to decide who would be the next president, vice president and parliamentarian of the council.
Under state law, the council is required to choose a president and vice president—which means those choices are supposed to be made at a meeting that is properly noticed, and accessible to the public to observe and record.
But the decision on a president, vice president and parliamentarian was worked out in secret on Jan. 2, before the council took a ceremonial vote at its Jan. 8 public meeting. It was a violation of the ODL.
That embarrassing bit of city council history is worth remembering—not just for the fact that committing an ODL violation on the second day of a term must surely be some kind of record for any city council in the Hoosier state.
It’s also important to recall that historical episode, because it highlights how very important some past Bloomington city councilmembers have considered the choice of its officers to be. It’s a choice that was so important that the deliberations apparently needed to be kept secret.
But why has the choice of Bloomington city council officers been so important in the past? It’s partly because the council officers have had privileged access to the mayor, compared to other councilmembers.
Under outgoing Bloomington mayor John Hamilton’s administration, the “council leadership” had routine meetings with the mayor—on Tuesdays before Wednesday council meetings—to review upcoming action and future mayoral initiatives.
That privileged access alone was enough of a motivating factor for at least some councilmembers of the past to aspire to be included in the “council leadership.”
There’s a separate Open Door issue connected to the “council leadership.” Because the council elects its officers with the assignment that they routinely meet with the mayor’s administration, that makes them a “committee” under Indiana’s Open Door Law. Those “council leadership” meetings should be noticed to the public and the public should be allowed to attend and record them.
The council’s attorney, Stephen Lucas, has never offered a counter to the B Square analysis of the “council leadership” as a committee defined under the ODL.
Here’s where incoming mayor Kerry Thomson and the next city council president could collaborate, to break the cycle of secrecy.
Thomson could simply decide that she will not treat the council officers as a special subset of the council that has a special recurring meeting schedule with her. That would be consistent with the open government section of Thomson’s “Blueprint for a Better Bloomington.”
Whoever is elected council president at the council’s Jan. 10, 2024 meeting could direct a special council committee to tackle some basic nuts-and-bolts questions about the mechanics of constructing the council’s meeting agendas. The special committee could be directed to deliver a proposal by mid-February.
The mid-February report should include some alternatives to the current agenda template for a regular meeting. The agenda template for a meeting when legislation is considered could be designed for just that purpose, to focus just on the activity of potentially enacting legislation, and nothing more.
That is, a “regular meeting” could be conceived as an occasion where there are no reports from the mayor, or general public, that are not related to legislation on the agenda.
To handle just legislation that is ripe for a vote, surely no more than two such “regular meetings” per month would be needed—say on the first and third Wednesdays of the month. It’s even possible to imagine that only one such “regular meeting” would be required in a given month. It’s worth remembering that state law requires a city council to meet just once a month.
The off Wednesdays could be occasions for working sessions of the council and mayor, or town halls with the mayor and council.
Instead of working in secret with just a subset of the city council, the mayor could work in public with the whole council, looping in the rest of the people who live here.
Ideally, these regular working sessions or town halls would be occasions to air out ideas for future legislation—from councilmembers, the mayor, or residents. These gatherings would daylight the questions and perceived problems that proposed legislation is meant to address—before a new law or a resolution gets to the point of being drafted.
On this approach, the role of the council officers would be diminished—reduced just to the function prescribed by law. In the case of the council president, that role is limited to presiding over meetings, and performing certain ministerial acts.
This approach envisions a future where the choice of city council officers would not matter as much as it has in the past—because the structure of the council’s meetings would promote the visibility of the mayor’s interactions with the whole council.
There is an irony here, which should be embraced: It’s important for Bloomington’s city council to choose a president to start 2024 who will lead us into a future where the choice of city council president is no longer all that important.
