BLOG: Council Chamber Shows No Respect for Citizens

Until you actually attend a meeting at our spanking new “state of the art” City Council chambers, you really won’t fully understand just how little respect the City has for the public.

The lavish chambers are the pride of the City Council, even though the chambers have proven to be a logistical nightmare anytime more than a hundred people appear at a meeting.  Insufficient seating, lack of appropriate lighting, inadequate ventilation and atrocious acoustics create an unwelcoming atmosphere and force much of the public to leave before the Council actually gets a chance to start the actual business on their agenda.  The heading of Mayor Jeff Prang’s newsletter pictures him smiling inanely in the new chambers: it is an ironic juxtaposing of incompetence and ineffectiveness.

Bad Design

At a recent Council meeting, a maintenance man had to push the heavy sliding glass door open and closed as people entered or left the chambers.  Apparently “state of the art” design does prevent the newly installed doors from falling off track.  I guess $70 million dollars simply does not buy what it used to.

The uninitiated may naively ask why the door simply could not have remained open.  Unfortunately because of the design and location of the chambers, all of the sounds in the anteroom and entrance to parking structure, which is just outside the anteroom, function as echo chambers.  When the door to the Council chambers is open, the outside noises bounce in, making it impossible to hear what anyone inside is saying. 

Patience Wears Thin

But the problems with our City Council meetings are not merely logistical.  The City Council itself is largely responsible for the totally inconsiderate way the meetings are conducted.

While the meeting is scheduled to start at 6:30 p.m., the actual business does not commence until after the City Council has spent an hour plus issuing proclamations and awarding commendations.  Another twenty minutes is set aside for public comment, which is then followed by agonizingly long Council members’ comments.  While John Duran made some efforts as Mayor to limit his colleague’s long-winded monologues, his requests for Council to restrict their self indulgent monologues has gone unheeded. 

As a general rule it is nearly two hours after the meeting was called to order before the Council begins its’ actual business.

This means that citizens that come to City Council meetings to deal with issues that impact their neighborhoods must wait until nearly 8:30 p.m. before their items comes before the City Council.  Of course that is assuming their item is the first item of new business.  Often citizens have to wait until after 9:30 or 10 p.m. before their Council item is heard.  Controversial issues are often not concluded until after midnight.

While audience members have complained that the City Council’s self congratulatory and lengthy proclamations and redundant accommodations take an inordinate amount of time from the business of governance, the Council is oblivious to the annoyance of their captive audience.

An appeal of large scale developments to the City Council is the most common item that brings folks to a City Council meeting.  Neighborhood leaders have found that if they tell people to come at 8 or 8:30 p.m., when the Council finally starts the first public hearing, most folks simply get too comfortable or distracted at home and never make it to the meeting.  Certainly the prospect of coming to a meeting at 8:30 p.m. with the knowledge that you may not be heard until after 10 or 11 p.m. is a major disincentive for constituents to participate in our local “democracy.” 

While Abbe Land will babble on and on during Council member comments, the public is strictly restricted to two minutes and the Citizen’s comments period at the beginning of the meeting is limited to twenty minutes.  That means that basically a dozen or so residents can be heard while Council members ramble on and on without any regard to the discomfort of the public waiting for the business of the meeting to start. 

City Staff Benefits As Well

Of course you won’t hear any complaints from City staff about our longwinded Council members.  They are racking up comp time at every Council meeting, as much as six to seven hours a pop.  For many of them, their only challenge is staying awake as most of them are on call on the outside chance the City Council has a question about an item in their bailiwick.  When you multiply the number of hours by the number of City employees at these meetings, the costs to tax payers are appalling.

Acoustics and Ventilation

Although the seats of the new chambers are plush, a crowded chamber is a horror.  The acoustics guarantee that you will have a splitting headache within an hour.  A crowded chamber quickly becomes stifling as there is no effective ventilation.  At a recent meeting the Mayor was calling for a fan to cool the dais. 

Boredom and discomfort force many attendees to sit in the anteroom.  Unfortunately the noise of anteroom becomes so amplified due to poor design that it can be heard within the chambers, particularly as the sliding glass door opens. 

The permanent seating is supplemented by movable chairs, which brings the capacity of the room to approximately 180 people.  Unfortunately there are anywhere from twenty five to thirty five City employees attending a meeting, thus limiting the number of seats available to the public to half of what it was in the old auditorium. 

Given the astronomical cost of the entire Library/Council Chamber complex, you would think that the City could have hired a competent architect who would have anticipated the need to design an acoustically effective meeting room.  Obviously the City was only concerned about creating an ostentatious design to stroke Council egos rather than worry about constructing something that might serve the needs of the public.

The problems with the new chambers have many residents complaining that we were better off holding Council meetings in the old auditorium.  Now that the old West Hollywood Park Auditorium is slated for demolition, many people are wondering if demolition is a sound decision.  We should have at least one place for public meetings that is user friendly.

Proposed Projects Not Promising Given the Past

Now that the City has announced plans to build a “state of the art performing arts center” in Plummer Park, citizens should be concerned that the same level of incompetence that resulted in the poor design of the City Council chambers will be replicated in Plummer Park. 

The new Council chambers were supposed to be a monument to West Hollywood’s coming of age.  Instead they are a monument to a City Council that puts ego over practicality.  Where else but the “Progressive City” of West Hollywood would a City Council actually build Council chambers that provide fifty percent less seating than their old meeting place?  The message is obvious: the public is not welcome to participate in its own government. 

Steve Martin

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