Wednesday, June 15, 2005

council passes anti-patriot act resolution

We (Stanley, Alice, and I) showed up at the Norwalk Common Council chambers at about 7:45 Tuesday evening. We were there until nearly 2:00 Wednesday morning. There were three resolutions before the Council that, combined, packed the audience. They moved the meeting from chambers to the Concert Hall because so many people showed up.

I think it’s a pretty strange procedure to have speakers all line up and speak out about resolutions before anybody even knows what the resolutions are. The way it’s all a mish-mash makes no sense—speakers who had no intention of speaking to any resolution but the one they were interested digressed to encompass the other resolutions, it was bizarro-land, for the most part. Seems a more logical procedure would be to present the resolution, ask for speakers, debate it, then vote on it and then go on to the next resolution.

There were some good speeches on all sides of all the issues. A couple orators I would like to listen to for more than the allotted three minutes. And there was stuff I wanted to say, but decided to just shut up and not add to the listening load, especially since a couple of the speakers presented my issues more eloquently than I ever could.

The first resolution had to do with the Council urging the Mayor Knopp to get off his ass about the firefighters’ contract, or lack of one I should say. They’ve been working without a contract (or raise) for three years. It’s now in binding arbitration. The mayor said, in a pre-vote speech that went on interminably, cycling the same points as if repetition would make it more believable (a Bushie tactic), that the union had canceled some of the more recent negotiation sessions. Like two or three since April. But didn’t get into why it had even dragged into April 2005 to begin with. The Council amended the resolution to call on the mayor AND the union to get on with it—rendering it pure even more meaningless mush. The firefighters walked out in disgust. I don’t blame them.

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posted by lee on 06/15/05 at 04:35 PM

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