The Zoning Commission is asking the City Council to move the commission’s meetings to 3 p.m. the first Thursday of each month. Since January, the commission has been meeting at 6 p.m.
This comes as no surprise. Up until January of this year, the Zoning Commission met at 1 p.m. the first Thursday of each month, and they really didn’t want to change. In fact, two commission members threatened to quit if the council changed the meeting time. Those turned out to be empty threats as no one resigned.
The purpose of changing the schedule was to allow more participation from residents who are not able to attend Zoning Commission meetings in the middle of the day because they’re working. Now, the Zoning Commission is saying that attendance is not any different than it was before, and that having the meetings earlier would save the city money in overtime/comp time pay. They offer no hard numbers.
I don’t see how a 3 p.m. meeting is going to be any easier for the first-shift working public to attend than a 1 p.m. meeting. And I would be interested to see some empirical evidence for the commission’s contention that “attendance was always based on whether the topic on the agenda was controversial or not” and that “controversial topics brought out more people whether the meetings were held in the afternoon or in the evening.”
It will be interesting to see the council’s reaction to this request.
Find another community in the region that has daytime meetings, none? then look statewide? Only very few and none comparable to size/organization of Peoria? then look nationwide… Something telling you that for the public to be able to benefit from a public meeting it needs to be scheduled when MOST of the public is most likely to attend?