Recipe: Agenda Upside-Down Cake

How would our first meeting with the upside-down agenda (executive session first and resident comments last) work for our fair city? In one way, last night’s meeting was very productive. The business licenses were granted, the contracts for salt, slurry, concrete, etc were all put into ordinance. However, the meeting started with disagreement and there was always a thread of discontent running through the meeting.

So, for those of you who can’t wait until the televised version on Thursday, here are some of the lowlights:

Queen tries to immediately move meeting to Executive Session with the sole purpose to sell Wild Acres. This was done despite statements at the August meeting that she has no intention to sell this seminary property. Later in the meeting she makes a similar statement that she has no intention to sell this property, but she “just doesn’t know what to do with it.”


Queen hires alternate law firm to work on this and the Cozad project without authorization of the city council. She wants Mr. Cunningham (the alternate lawyer) to be the sole city representative while negotiating the Cozad deal. City council overrides this and says they want Herman involved in all city legal dealings. I can only assume this was a backdoor route to get rid of Bob Herman when added in with her trying to have him removed from the meetings several times.

Speaking of removing from meetings, in addition to Herman, The Queen tried to have O’Connell removed from the meeting. Can you legally remove someone from a meeting that they are legally required to attend? More ORT circular logic at work.

Veto magic: The Queen "vetoed" the council's rejection of paying for her consultant and lawyer. Can one "veto" a measure that was never put before them? If council votes down something, it is not veto-able, right?

The Queen did plenty to put her foot in her mouth. Highlights include:

• “I’m no leader” when asked by a resident of her leadership ability.
• When speaking of the Cozad project, she wanted to move forward so the project could come to “fruitation”. One can only assume that Cozad plans to develop an orchard on the property.
• She called Jeff O’Connell an idiot for questioning her circular logic.
• “It’s none of the citizen’s business” when asked why she felt it necessary to do certain city business behind closed doors. Specifically the Cozad deal, which does NOT fall under the provisions of Executive Session rules under state Sunshine Law.

Residents’ comments were moved to the end. This can only come back to bite the ORT, as we can now comment directly on their actions of the evening. Knode had his usual 30-minute prepared speech (Why does he get unlimited time and we get 3 minutes?). In this, he said he supported our first amendment rights. Then, went on to state how limiting those rights by limiting comments to 15 minutes was just great. He said that resident comments were disruptive of city business.

If resident participation in their government disrupts “city business”, then the city is in the wrong business.