Will council cut meeting time?

The Salt Lake City Council is considering reducing the number of meetings it holds every week. Supporters call it a way to save staff members' time, but Mayor Rocky Anderson thinks it's a "misprioritization."

The change could also exclude some people who would otherwise run for office and may limit the public's involvement, some council members worry.

Councilwoman Jill Remington Love made the proposal at the council's meeting Thursday, saying she worries city staff — planners, advisers and others paid by taxpayers to help the council make its decisions — spend too much time after hours sitting through late meetings without any overtime pay.

The council meets on Tuesday and Thursday evenings three weeks a month. Formal council meetings, where votes are cast and public input is taken, are held Tuesdays at 7 p.m. and are relatively short.

But the real action happens at work-session meetings, held Tuesdays and Thursdays at 5:30 p.m. and sometimes running until 10 p.m. or later. There, the council debates issues, gets input from staff and hashes out ideas. Usually, a majority consensus is reached in work session, and the formal vote is essentially a technicality.

Love's idea is to follow the Salt Lake County Council's model: hold a meeting every Tuesday, with a work session starting in the early afternoon and a formal meeting in the evening. It would mean 17 fewer meetings each year.

Anderson's idea is to waste less time in the meetings.

"Certain members of the council seem to never have an unexpressed thought," the mayor said Thursday. "I don't understand why there are some council members who feel they need to make a speech" on every issue.

He said the council chair chairman has the authority to keep discussion on track and spur things along. But if self-policing doesn't work, he said, the council could consider changing its rules to limit each council member's speaking time to two minutes on an issue, similar to restrictions placed on public comments.

Love's idea will get a test run, likely during March and April, so the council can see whether it improves or worsens efficiency, works better or worse for staff and fits or clashes with council members' work schedules.

She envisions staff members working in their offices during meetings, listening to the meeting's online streaming audio so they know when their agenda item is about to come up.

She also sees the change opening council membership to a wider range of residents.