This is not an observation original to me — in fact, it’s been pointed out by a couple different people since the last council meeting — and it concerns the time limit for discussion by council members during City Council meetings.

The City Council has a self-imposed rule of five minutes per council member on any one topic of business. In 2007, they started “enforcing” it with a (very expensive) timer and a buzzer. Furthermore, any citizens wishing to address the council must limit their comments to five minutes. This was done to keep the meetings from going too long due to council members repeating the same arguments in their own words.

But there’s no time limit for proclamations. At the beginning of nearly every council meeting, the Mayor makes several proclamations, which recognize individuals, businesses, and civic groups for their contributions and achievements in the community. At the last council meeting, the proclamations portion of the meeting clocked in at approximately 45 minutes.

Now, there’s nothing wrong with celebrating civic achievements, of course. I have no beef about that. The problem is the disparity in time spent on “fluff” versus the time allotted to deliberate more serious matters of public policy. As important and worthy as civic achievement is, its recognition is not the main business of municipal government. For the Mayor and council members to speak as long as they wish about National Bookmobile Day, but limit them to five minutes each for the discussion of tax levies and millions of dollars in expenditures, is a poor allocation of time and does a disservice to taxpayers.

Some issues simply require more than five minutes to discuss. Some issues are more complicated than others. It’s one thing to ask someone who’s repeating themselves to wrap up their comments; it’s another thing to cut off pertinent explanations or discussions because of an arbitrary time limit. Furthermore, five minutes is too long for some topics.

The bottom line is that the moderator (and that’s the Mayor, in the case of the City Council) should be leading the meeting based on content, not the clock. The meeting should be conducted in the interests of making the best decisions for constituents, not in the interests of getting done as quickly as possible. And, the moderator should recognize that the people’s business is more important and deserves more time than proclamations or other preliminaries.