City Council postponed its much-anticipated Public Safety Update at the 11th hour last night to allow staff to tweak the report and correct inaccuracies.
“There is information that needs to be clarified by staff in the staff report itself in some of the documents that have been provided, so we want to provide those clarifications and more context at a future meeting for further discussion,” said City Manager David Wilson.
Councilmember John Erickson strongly supported postponing the update.
“We can have the discussion (but), there are inaccuracies in the report and therefore the public is misinformed because we’re reading it wrong,” he said.
The nature of the inaccuracies was unclear, and any references to specifics were oblique.
Councilmember Lindsey Horvath questioned the logic of postponing the update, while Councilmember John D’Amico worried the public would not be happy with tabling a discussion that had been so anticipated.
Both he and Horvath voted no on the motion, but it passed 3-2.
My recollection is that D’Amico said he was worried about tabling the discussion, but voted to table it anyway. The two yes votes were Lauren Meister and Lindsey Horvath.
I think you mean the two NO votes. And I believe it was only Horvath…voting NOT to postpone.
Leslie. Lindsey and I voted against the acceptance of the agenda, which tabled the item. We did not want to table the item. We wanted to have the discussion as planned. If you’d like to discuss send me an email jdamico@weho.org and we can set up a call.
I watched it again and stand corrected. I appreciate your and Lindsey’s vote against accepting the agenda.
Rashamon
That was Rashomon.
The commission report has inaccuracies, the commission itself is inaccurate and the council postponed any discussion of public safety. How about a discussion on public trust? This IS ACCURATE: We Do Not Trust The Council Nor The Process. Pathetic and disgusting is more like it.
Sad but very true.
True.
This was a staff report, not a commission report. I don’t know that the commission was delivering inaccurate info, vs. a staff screw-up, or maybe both. But if they’ve known about it since last Thursday, there was time for them to fix it by Monday. As far as the Council goes, I don’t think they had anything to do with it. I believe they received the request to postpone from the City Manager on Monday. And more than one Councilmember was outraged. In the end, they had no choice but to table the item, if the information was inaccurate. How… Read more »
If there ever was an issue that needed to be dealt with head on, this is it. Procrastination and treating public safety like a public relations problem shows how myopic the deciders are.
Correct.
D’Amico is right. The public are not happy about tabling the discussion. The public are not happy with a council that is failing in its number one duty of public safety. The public are not happy with a staff and city manager who now seem to have been miserably ill-prepared for this critical issue on the agenda. The public are not happy with the public safety commission’s recommendation to cut patrol deputies. The public are not happy. There are many questions that need to be asked. Who wrote the report? Who approved the report? Who provided the inaccurate or misleading… Read more »
The public is not happy about tabling the item but we are also unhappy that John D’Amico’s appointee to the Public Safety Commission voted to cut ten deputies. The only good thing about tabling the item is that the next Council meeting will feature in person testimony. It will be interesting to see if there were “inaccuracies” and mistakes in the staff report or just things the Council didn’t like. But in defense of staff they were as unprepared and dumbfounded as the rest of us when this motion to de-fund the Sheriff’s department came out of nowhere. Given that… Read more »
I don’t think staff gets any defense here. This falls squarely on their shoulders, and Wilson’s. Arevalo would never let this happen, especially after the staff’s screw-up, which resulted in the cancellation of the previous meeting, and already a 2 week delay in this discussion. Also, the public safety commission was a week ago today. They had time to fix this. They should have worked through the weekend, if they truly knew there were problems last Thursday.
So true; none of this would have happened under Paul Arevalo.
I think the fact that this was referred to as a “difficult conversation” indicates the possibility that the data didn’t support the inevitable, that 10 deputies will be eliminated. I think Horvath was willing to have the conversation anyway, whilst others on the Council want to back it up with data, so that they can just be “the messenger”. Maybe for Horvath, it’s more important that this strategy aligns with her goals as a politician.
There was something about a former Sheriff’s volunteer who might be the answer to some of your questions.
“The public IS not happy”, The word public is a collective noun & considered as one singular unit. Therefore “The public IS not happy”. Just as the audience is not happy, The crowd is not happy, The Senate is not happy.
Collective nouns take plural verbs when conveying a difference of opinion. Nice try, Robin. Is this the best we can do in civil discourse? My grammar stands as correct, unless you mean to imply that my comment represents unanimity among the public.
Hopefully Alan and Robin won’t move the discussion into pronouns.
Thanks, Steve! We can always count on you for moments of levity. I was not writing for the public collectively as one, but rather for the many members of the public who have made their feelings clear. My usage of the plural verb with the collective noun is supported by grammar experts in academia and elsewhere. Such usage is also more commonly employed by the British people, the ones who invented the language and have used it for far longer than we have abused it!
Don’t be defensive! You have seen my assault on the English language with my fractured syntax and creative grammar.
I should have added a smiley emoji at the end of my previous post. I did not take offense to your comment, so didn’t mean to come across as defensive with you…now roll the happy emoji! 🙂
🙄