It happened in August of 2006, and according to Blogtown (although they don’t describe it this way), it’s happened again. The right of anyone to request that items be pulled off the Consent Agenda is enshrined in both the City Code and the City Charter.
As I asked back then: Does no one actually care that both the Code (3.02.036) and the Charter (Section 2-127) specifically preclude preventing someone from pulling items off the Consent Agenda? Was the City Attorney asleep when this happened? Or does City Council — and those in its employ — simply not give a shit about the City’s highest law?
Addendum: WWire details the incident. Nowhere does Potter or anyone else ask Seaton why he wants to pull every item off the Consent Agenda. And there’s no basis under the law for Potter saying that Seaton had “to name one” — the premise there, I assume, being that Potter was trying to say that Seaton could only pull a single item.
Now, I have little doubt that the point was to disrupt the proceedings. It’s unlikely that Seaton or anyone else wanted to testify about each and every item on the Consent Agenda in turn, one by one.
But no one asked him.
Until and unless Potter — or anyone else — asked him about it, there’s no basis under Code or Charter for simply telling City Hall security to remove Seaton for requesting that every item be removed from the Consent Agenda. And given the previous instance of Potter blatantly violating these provisions, it would have been nice if someone had called him on it here.
More’s the shame that Leonard — who was amongst the people during the Joint Terrorism Task Force debate who pointed out that we’re meant to be a nation of laws, not a nation of men, with rules in place to prevent abuse of power — sided with Potter on violating City law.
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