City Council Organizational Meeting

Tonight the City Council will formally say good-bye to Dan Nash, Bob Moses, and Dean Sorenson and seat the members of the "new" Council. We will also be electing one of ourselves to be Mayor and Assistant Mayor. And we will likely rubber stamp the Council rules. I believe we could be a more productive and effective City Council if we used this meeting as an opportunity to reflect on the coming year, identify how we would like to conduct our meetings, and determine priorities for the City Council.

A concern that I have heard raised by numerous citizens is that Lebanon is not proactive enough. We are too reactive. This is usually spoken about in relation to our physical development, e.g. Route 12A. However, it is as applicable to the City Council itself as it is to the City. The Council has the power to make sure that we address the issues that citizens have told us are important to them by managing our agenda more effectively. Individual City Councilors do have the ability to request specific agenda items, and we do take advantage of that. But we could accomplish even greater things if we agreed as a body on the goals we want to achieve over the coming year. We could use the organizational meeting to do precisely that: organize ourselves for the coming year. This could be a good time to review the strategic plan, to determine priorities for agenda items, and to proactively map out the issues we wish to address.

My experience with the two organizational meetings that I have participated in as a City Councilor lead me to believe that tonight will not break new ground in this area. But I believe we can move in this direction over time. Tonight each Councilor will receive the strategic plan and the goals adopted by the City Council at the March 7th meeting. I believe City Councilors have a shared responsibility in advancing the interests of our citizens, and I look forward to doing just that as we enter this new year for the Lebanon City Council.