By Common Council member Bruce Kimmel (D-District D)
NORWALK, Conn. – Last month, the majority of Norwalk’s Common Council voted to table an item without first discussing it. No parliamentary rules were broken; there was nothing done secretly; nor was it unusual for the council to table an item. Nonetheless, there was a fair amount of anger among a few council members who made a variety of charges about breaches of democracy, mayoral control and power grabs.
Because tabling motions cannot be debated, the council has maintained a tradition of not making such motions until after there has been some discussion. This legislative courtesy not only provides the public with information about the goings-on of the body, it also allows members to make their views public before the agenda item is removed from the public eye. I have always supported this tradition, and will continue to do so. It’s a tradition that promotes democratic discussion.
However, on Oct. 9, I voted to immediately table a resolution that was presented to the council by five Democratic members. The resolution called for the Police Commission to rescind its decision to eliminate the position of captain in the police department and to begin promoting officers to that rank. The resolution rejected the recommendation contained in a study done by the International Association of Police Chiefs in 1997, and updated in 2007, which urged the city to eliminate those positions by attrition.
(According to this study and the update, eliminating captains would create a flatter, more agile organization better able to deal with gun-related crimes. The Norwalk police chief has stated that elimination of those positions would ultimately allow the department to deploy more officers on the street. Thus, the Police Commission stopped promotions to captain a few years ago, and the position will soon disappear completely from the organization.)
But the question remains: Why did council members violate the tradition of allowing discussion prior to making motions to table? While I cannot speak for others, there seem to be three reasons that explain why we broke tradition: perceptions of the council’s jurisdiction, the content of the resolution, and the definition of what exactly constitutes a debate.
Some members believed the captain issue was none of the council’s business, and that it should never have come before the body. I disagree with that view because over the years a variety of resolutions have been debated and voted on by the council that did not relate to the usual business of the body. These were generally recommendations for other legislative bodies, what I call “sense of the council” resolutions.
Nonetheless, I was disturbed when I learned the resolution would be presented to the full council before the issue had gone before the Health, Welfare and Public Safety committee. Issues pertaining to the police are a regular part of the agenda. More importantly, committee level discussions are generally thorough. I believe we would have had an informative discussion of all sides of the issue at the committee level. Then, if some members were still not happy, a resolution might then have been in order. I am certain it would have been better received, and possibly debated.
Other members noted that the resolution contained a number of factual, even absurd, statements, such as comparing the organizational structure of our police department with cities of three and four million people. The resolution also ignored the fact that the responsibilities of captains in other cities are far different than in Norwalk, that in many cities captains are part of upper management. (In Connecticut, captains must be part of the police union.) Still, I do not believe factual errors, which can be easily removed during debate, are sufficient reason to stifle debate on an important matter.
My concern with the resolution, and the primary reason I voted to immediately table it (instead of allowing debate and then voting against it), was only partially related to jurisdiction or content. I believe the majority of council members, along with a large section of the public, plus other city officials, were deeply disturbed by the ugly tone of recent council “debates.” We were tired of the insults, interruptions and name-calling.
This is my fifth term on the council. Although I have been involved in a fair number of heated discussions, I have never witnessed anything close to the nastiness of current members. I have never seen nastiness become a substitute for reasoned discussion on such a regular basis.
For me, the question was straightforward: In light of all the recent ugliness, why follow tradition and extend the legislative courtesy?
Bruce Kimmel
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