NICK GOSNELL
Hutch Post
HUTCHINSON, Kan. — There was robust discussion at Tuesday's Hutchinson City Council meeting about being clear that the public can speak to items as they come up on the agenda, not just at the public input portion of a meeting about items that are not on the agenda.
"Things are able to come out of committee and then immediately come before the City Council," council member Stacy Goss said. "If it's immediately on the agenda for us after it comes out of committee, it doesn't allow any time for us to allow public comment or allow kind of a cooling off period to consider what the committee just completed."
City Attorney Paul Brown clarified that yes, the council can choose to allow the public to comment when an item is on the agenda at the time that it comes up on the agenda.
"We haven't been allowing for that or encouraging that, in a way," Goss said. "I think if we...maybe it's just everybody's misunderstanding of how the process should be. It didn't sit well with me when the Evergy topic was up and we had people in the audience who, I've never seen them at a meeting before, they only came because the topic they were interested in was being considered. They sat there and they didn't get to talk because, then when we got to the agenda item, we heard from Evergy, we heard from city officials, but we didn't hear from the audience."
There are other things that can be done to allow the council to have an idea of the public response for an item.
"A lot of places have people sign up to speak," Goss said. "I don't know if that's for record keeping or what, but there's more than one way to skin a cat and I don't think that there's any strong feelings about holding to the way that we currently do things."
Goss also raised the issue of having some of the meetings in the evening, as well, but that is a topic that will need some further discussion after the election, when the body finds out if it will have the same members or not.
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