Night Meetings---2 Votes Short

At today's county board meeting, I took a bold step.  A proposed ordinance would move the county board meetings from 9:00 a.m. to 7:30 a.m.  I proposed an amendment that would instead move those meetings to the evening at 7:00 p.m.  Supervisor Kelling was quick to step up and second the motion.

I have heard from many of my neighbors regarding the desire to move meetings to the evening, to increase public access to our proceedings.  I am working to try to make that a reality.

I knew going in that there was fairly strong support for night meetings.  While the amendment was 2 votes short, it was closer to succeeding than any previous attempt at making night meetings permanent.

The fight on this issue is not by any means over.  Instead, there are a lot of positives.

1.      I now know for sure that I have 10 other Supervisors who definitely share my view on night meetings.

2.      Three of the other Supervisors who voted in favor of this motion were on the executive board, including Mike Bassill, Tim Michalak, and Kris Diess.

3.      I also know that, if our rules would have allowed for an amendment to move the day of our meetings to Thursday, the amendment might have picked up another vote or two.

4.      Most importantly, the old guard knows how close that motion was, and can guess that the days of meeting during the daytime, away from public scrutiny, are coming to a close.

I plan to look at options for bringing this up again next summer.  Worst case scenario, we might pick up a vote or two in the April 2018 election, depending on how those elections go.