Thread by @davidfholt

A walk through a typical Council meeting (thread)

Today was a typical meeting of the City Council, following a framework the Council has probably followed for decades. I thought I would walk you through that framework in case you ever attend or watch a Council meeting.

Generally, regular meetings of the Council occur every other Tuesday at 8:30 am at City Hall. In our system, the Mayor presides. All nine elected officials have an equal vote on all items considered on the agenda. The agenda is created by the City Manager.

The people who sit on “the horseshoe” are the Mayor and Council, the City Manager, the Municipal Counselor and the City Clerk.

In addition to the regular meetings, special meetings are occasionally held. During the spring, we often hold such meetings to hear budget presentations. Right now, we are holding special meetings to discuss MAPS 4. Other topics arise from time to time.

You can attend meetings in-person, watch the live on Channel 20 in OKC, or watch them on delay at @cityofokc’s Youtube channel.

Here is the front page of today’s agenda. The format of this page hasn’t changed in decades.

This first page of the actual agenda covers several typical rituals and the first few items of substantive business.

Office of the Mayor is where we often have special presentations, proclamations, other ceremonial stuff. It is also where I place my appointments to various boards and commissions.

Journal of Council Proceedings is a fancy phrase for the minutes. The Clerk keeps minutes and then we approve them.

Request for Uncontested Continuances is where the City Manager identifies some things that - for whatever reason - he already knows are being stricken from the agenda or deferred to another meeting. He’ll list them and then we don’t talk about them again.

Revocable Permits is where we consider granting permits to various organizations holding festivals, races, etc. They typically come to the podium and give a little ad for their event before we vote.

Now we get into the real nitty gritty. For the next several pages we recess as Council and convene as three different trusts that have the same membership as the Council - OCMFA, OCPPA, and OCEAT. On the agendas of those bodies are a lot of contracts, purchases, settlements, etc.

The City of OKC is a billion-dollar enterprise with 4,800 employees and jurisdiction over 650,000 people and 620 square miles. Everything of legal and budget consequence has to be voted on by the Council. That sort of housekeeping takes up 90 percent of every Council agenda.

God bless the many, many City employees who do all the work represented on these many pages. Every item on every agenda has a story behind it & someone’s hard work that made it possible. Buried in the dry language of that agenda are the services & infrastructure we all depend on.

We finally reconvene as the Council again where we reach the consent docket. The consent docket is a place for routine items to be voted on all at once. There are usually pages of items.

Developing the consent docket is an art for the City Manager. Sometimes the City Manager guesses wrong and an item on the consent docket is controversial and needs to be pulled out for a separate vote. But that’s not a big deal, Councilmembers request that all the time.

Sometimes Councilmembers identify an item on the consent docket to discuss or highlight, sometimes they want a separate vote or to defer the item to a future meeting. Sometimes there are staff presentations. Today’s consent docket took a few minutes but they can take much longer.

Some trusts have so much legal authority their work does not have to be ratified by the Council (our water trust is an example), but past Councils didn’t like not seeing what they were doing so they created the concurrence docket, where the Council also approves those items.

After that are the items requiring separate votes. This always starts with planning & zoning cases that have first been considered a few weeks before at the Planning Commission. Usually consideration here is brief as the in-depth hearing was held at Planning Commission.

There are often ordinance changes on the agenda. This is essentially the equivalent of passing legislation. In our system we introduce the change, have a hearing on the change, and then adopt (or not) the change. At least three meetings.

We always have items to declare a variety of structures as dilapidated, unsecured or abandoned. These declarations trigger certain powers of the city to intervene.

Very often there are some lawsuits against the City to address. Sometimes we go into executive session (on this one we did not).

There are always items approving and denying claims made against the city.

Near the end, we always have Items of Council. Sometimes they request substantive items here. In any case, we always go around the horseshoe and they have a chance to make some general comments.

Then the City Manager and/or staff deliver reports that weren’t linked to an item on the agenda that required a vote. For example, today we heard an update on streetlight repairs.

Finally, citizens who have signed up to speak may speak on any topic they like for up to three minutes. If there is an executive session from an earlier item, we usually handle it here. And then we adjourn!

If you’ve made it this far, thanks for taking this walk through a typical City Council agenda with me!