Column: Bloomington’s city council should reject ‘bundling’ of bills, engage public earlier and better
Appearing for a vote on the Bloomington city council’s Wednesday (Aug. 7) agenda is a single piece of legislation—Appropriation Ordinance 2024-02.
That one ordinance could have, and should have, been split into three. That’s because the one ordinance covers three different topics and three different funds.
Affected by the ordinance are: the general fund (appropriation for a new deputy clerk position); the food and beverage tax fund (appropriation for the capital improvement board’s budget revision); and the American Rescue Plan Act fund (redistribution of money originally allocated to Heading Home of South Central Indiana).
There’s nothing illegal about bundling appropriations like this. But by bundling three appropriations together, it puts the city council in a procedural bind—under any scenario where they don’t want to take the same action on all three appropriations.
Say, for example, they want to approve one, reject another, and postpone the third. Is that procedurally possible? Probably so, but documenting the “division of the question” into three separation questions would be cumbersome. And in the future it would be difficult for someone to answer the question: Was App Ord 2024-02 approved?
But there’s another reason why dissimilar appropriation ordinances should not be bundled together into one: It dilutes focus on each appropriation and increases the chance that mistakes are not caught.
There’s a numerical mistake in App Ord 2024-02 that was left unnoted in the council’s administrator/attorney’s memo to the council about the ordinance.
The amount of the appropriation for the new deputy clerk’s position is listed in the ordinance as totalling about $107,000. It was just about about two months ago, in mid-June, when the council approved a change to the city’s salary ordinance to add the extra deputy clerk position. On that occasion, the city HR director’s memo indicated that the fiscal impact of adding the position would be about $88,000.
It’s not the difference between $107,000 and $88,000 that should have caught the council’s staff attention. It’s the fact that the council is apparently being asked to approve an appropriation to fund a new deputy clerk’s salary for a full year, when the year is already more than half over.
When The B Square inquired separately with city controller Jessica McClellan and city clerk Nicole Bolden, they both took ownership of the dollar figure in the ordinance as a mistake. McClellan indicated that the council might amend the amount at the meeting and that she would have numbers ready this Wednesday for the council to use in an amendment.
This is not the end of the world. But it highlights the fact that sometimes council staff do not engage the materials that the administration submits to the council for action in a useful enough or early enough way.
When was the first chance for the council staff to look at the final version of App Ord 2024-02 proposed by the administration? That date can be calculated.
The ordinance received its first reading in front of the city council on July 31. (This Wednesday’s vote is the so-called second reading.) According to city code, each piece of legislation submitted to the city council has to be accompanied by any relevant documents, and filed with the council office at least 10 days before the meeting when it is introduced.
If that 10-day deadline was met, it means the city council staff should have seen App Ord 2024-02 and its supporting documents by Monday morning, July 22.
What happened next? Whatever it was, it was not visible to the public.
But by Friday of that week, a memo about App Ord 2024-02 had been written by the council staff and included in the council’s meeting information packet, consisting of a single .pdf into which all the files had been combined. The single .pdf file was posted to the city’s website on Friday, July 26.
How well did the council staff memo serve the public and the council? I think it is hard to claim that the council’s staff memo includes any information that is not already included in the city corporation counsel’s memo on the same ordinance.
The one example of added information comes at the end of council staff memo, in the form of two citations to state law about how appropriation ordinances are generally handled. If those statutes are viewed by the council to be essential and useful, then the council should consider asking that the administration add that kind of information to its standard template for memos supporting an appropriation ordinance.
Instead of spending time writing memos that add little informational value to the process, the council staff could instead put its time into immediately posting to the city council’s web server all the individual files connected with proposed legislation, just as soon as they are submitted to the office.
The agenda with supporting documents could be published on Monday before a council meeting that is scheduled on the Wednesday that is 10 days away.
The format of such agendas could follow the same approach The B Square has taken for almost a year and a half. But council staff could have an easier time of it than The B Square. That’s because staff could just upload the individual documents and link to them, instead of first extracting the individual documents from a .pdf that runs a few hundred pages long. (That’s the current meeting information packet that the council staff build out of separate documents.)
On a Monday, along with the agenda, the council staff could publish a web form that members of the city council and the public alike could use to start submitting factual questions about the agenda. Some of those questions could identify mistakes like the one involving the dollar amount for the deputy clerk’s appropriation. Council staff would collate and curate the questions, track down answers, and then on Friday, post the questions with answers to the council’s web server.
That would mean on Friday, before the coming Wednesday’s council meeting, the public and the council would already be getting a first round of answers to questions about legislation, instead of just seeing the proposed legislation for the very first time.
This approach would require rethinking the desired skill set for the city council’s staff. Does the city council really need two staff members who are licensed to practice law in the state of Indiana?
At last week’s meeting, councilmembers took an important first step to rethinking skill sets for its staff. That step came in the context of a discussion about filling the currently vacant council administrator/attorney position. There seems to be at least some interest among some councilmembers in separating out the functions of administrator and attorney.
I hope that they pursue this idea, and re-evaluate what actual outcomes they want to achieve with the council’s staffing structure.
The council’s Wednesday (Aug. 7) meeting starts at its usual time of 6:30 p.m.
Below is a list of The B Square’s desirable outcomes, followed by a calendar template outlining how legislative material could be handled.
Positive Outcomes for Residents
- Residents routinely see communications from and send messages to the city council through social media channels like Facebook, X (formerly Twitter), and Instagram.
- Residents routinely use a city council website form to add themselves to a regular email distribution list used by the city council to update residents with important messages like recently published meeting agendas, requests for feedback, or information about council actions that were taken at recent meetings.
- Residents routinely visit the News section of the city council’s website to see the same content that is also accessible through emails sent to the distribution list.
- Residents routinely inspect council agendas formatted in standard HTML, 10 days before a regular legislative business meeting of the council.
- Residents routinely view links from council agenda items to individual files supporting exactly those items, including video recordings of deliberations by boards and commissions that previously discussed or made recommendations on the item to be considered by the council.
- Residents routinely use the same webform as councilmembers to submit written factual questions about upcoming meeting agenda items.
- Residents routinely see written answers to questions about meeting agenda items posted to the council’s web space, managed as a dataset, at least five days ahead of a city council meeting.
- Residents routinely submit written commentary on council agenda items and are able to see the written commentary of other residents and councilmembers on the same item, before the meeting takes place.
- Residents viewing a city council meeting on Zoom see relevant URLs posted to the chat window during the course of the meeting—like a link to a single .pdf containing the council’s agenda, at the start of the meeting when the agenda is summarized. Or a link to a .pdf containing only the ordinance that is getting introduced. Or a link to the slide deck that is being presented by a speaker.
- Residents routinely review all email communications and documents exchanged between councilmembers and the council staff, without making a records request.
- Residents routinely get questions about city council business answered by staff over the telephone.
- Residents routinely get useful information about the city council from an automated chat bot embedded in the council’s webpage.
- Residents routinely get individual or group tutorials from council staff about where to find information and data related to council business and the workings of the city, and the workings of other cities in Indiana—in cases where the information and data is already publicly accessible in digital repositories like B Clear or the DLGF reporting system.
- Residents never encounter a posted document from the city council that is not accessible because has not been properly OCRed or has been created in a way that doesn’t include fonts required to render intelligible copy-pasted text.
