Public Format for Council Meeting Still Up in the Air

It remains to be seen whether the public will be allowed to comment at a special meeting of the Wauwatosa Common Council tonight to reconsider a vote taken a month ago to reject contracts offered by three unions representing city employees.

As of late Monday, a number of aldermen who were contacted had not yet heard a decision from the city administration, and City Attorney Alan Kesner said that the format of the meeting rested with Mayor Jill Didier, who could not be reached for comment.

"The normal procedure is not to allow comment" at Common Council meetings, Kesner said. "But the mayor can run the meeting as she sees fit, and she doesn't have to announce in advance how she intends to handle it.

"I think she is" going to allow comment in some format, Kesner said, "but it isn't for me to say."

The special meeting is set for 6:30 p.m. and could run as long as an hour before the call to order of the regular council meeting to follow at 7:30 p.m. That time frame would allow for considerable public input, though not likely enough time for all who might wish to speak.

The mayor, in setting the format, could limit either the number of speakers or the length of time they could speak, or both.

"We've been waiting to hear," Ald. Linda Nikcevich said Monday afternoon. "It was posted as a Common Council meeting, not as a public meeting, so there would be no public comment time built in — that's reserved for committee meetings."

The special meeting for reconsideration of ratification of the contracts came about when a minimum of five aldermen petititoned last week for a new vote.

When the council rejected the contracts on March 15, signers of the petition say, it was because the public wanted their representatives to wait for the provisions of Gov. Scott Walker's budget repair bill to go into effect as expected on March 29.

But when the bill was delayed by litigation, possibly for months to come, aldermen learned that extending the old contracts with city unions was costing the city about $20,000 a week compared to savings in the unratified contracts.