There were things at Tuesday’s Durango City Council meeting one could note with satisfaction, watching on Facebook Live as it was conducted remotely, with each of the councilors in what we assume were their homes.
Interim City Manager Amber Blake reported on steps the city is taking during the pandemic to reopen Lake Nighthorse to people, as well as the utility fee waivers and sales tax deferrals it is offering to try to help Durango recover from the bad economic storm the nation and much of the world faces. These are grounds for some reassurance. So was the evening’s big victory, a unanimous vote to create an urban renewal authority, on which the council seemed to work in harmony.
Far more concerning and less harmonious was the time council spent yet again on something it calls working agreements, which seemed to have been initiated by the former mayor, Councilor Melissa Youssef, and have been avidly pursued by Councilor Dean Brookie, who became the mayor two weeks ago in the council’s regular rotation, and by Councilor Chris Bettin.
The agreements are supposed to describe the way councilors conduct themselves. In theory, they would be something on which the council would reach unanimous consent. Some friction may be inevitable in a healthy process, but if the process becomes more contentious rather than less, it is pointless. Such is the case here.
It was in the course of their discussing these agreements at the council meeting on April 21 that we were alarmed to hear Brookie flatly assert, in light of concerns voiced by Councilor Kim Baxter, that members of city boards and commissions are not citizens. What he seemed to mean, if we give him the benefit of the doubt, is that they are not entitled to speak as individuals about their work on boards and commissions and apparently do not enjoy all of the protections of the Bill of Rights. He also seemed to mean, as he stated, that members of these bodies can only speak as bodies to members of council, who in turn will only communicate as a council, not as individuals. Brookie also during this discussion for some reason accused Baxter, in her remote box, of smirking. She was smiling, she explained.
This continued through council’s intervening study session, and then for what seemed like an hour or more at Tuesday’s meeting, which may have reached a climax when Brookie furiously banged his gavel but was on mute; or when Baxter, hedging her bets, called the discussion “somewhat of a farce.”
She need not have qualified it. Brookie and Bettin kept tying themselves in knots about procedure and back of it was an apparent attempt to punish the newest members of council, Baxter and Barbara Noseworthy, for having questioned the fitness of the former city manager, prompting his departure; for having helped to unravel a fiscal mess; and for not having been gung-ho about proceeding with a bridge project at 32nd Street that much of the community as well as their constituents abhorred.
“If this is the way you behave,” Baxter said at the Tuesday meeting, “I don’t know why you think some fancy words on a piece of paper are going to change anything.”
She raises a good point about what is probably bound to happen when a majority tries to impose a code of conduct on a minority. At the end of the discussion, however, Youssef, Bettin and Brookie voted 3-2 to continue it at the next council meeting.
We think there are better things council could be doing now. And we think there is a better way forward here: Just focus on the city’s actual business.
