Speakers can have 5 minutes, but at the end

June Casagrande

People who want to talk to the City Council about consent calendar

items can still talk for five minutes, but they’ll have to wait a lot

longer to do so.

The City Council on Tuesday unanimously rejected the idea of

limiting to three minutes the time members of the public can speak

about items pulled off the consent calendar.

“Three minutes is not adequate,” council regular Dolores Otting

said. “This sends the wrong message to the city of Newport Beach, and

the message is that you don’t want to hear from us. You just want to

rubber stamp things.”

Though just two weeks before, Mayor Tod Ridgeway and others had

favored the idea of shortening speaking times for consent calendar

items, by the end of Tuesday’s meeting, all the council members were

swayed by about a half-dozen residents who shared Otting’s feelings.

“I think five minutes is the appropriate amount of time,”

Councilman John Heffernan said.

The councilmen were less unified on whether to change the order of

items on the agenda. With Ridgeway and Gary Adams dissenting, a

majority voted to keep the consent calendar at the beginning of the

evening’s agenda but to push to the end of the night talks on any

items pulled from the consent calendar.

The idea, supporters said, is that the people waiting to

participate in talks on non-consent calendar items such as public

hearings won’t have to wait an hour or two longer than they expected

just because one person wanted a consent calendar item pulled off the

agenda.

Some said that city staff members make wrong choices about what

items should be noncontroversial enough to get on the consent

calendar and what items require public attention and discussion.

City Manager Homer Bludau took responsibility.

“It’s hard to predict,” Bludau said. “I’ll try to do better in the

future.”

The idea to change the procedures was inspired largely by one man:

Balboa Island resident Jim Hildreth, who usually pulls from the

consent calendar the item to approve the minutes of the previous

meeting so he can protest how they were recorded.

Otting and other residents who spoke against the shortened comment

period agreed that Hildreth could help by being more selective in his

comments.

“Would people like to see me go away? Yes,” Hildreth said. “But

we’re the people, and we have a right to be heard.”

* JUNE CASAGRANDE covers Newport Beach and John Wayne Airport. She

may be reached at (949) 574-4232 or by e-mail at

[email protected].