Six hours at the table. Again.

[indent]Another six-hour council marathon last night. And even with that amount of time, by the end of the night we still had not covered everything on the agenda. We broke off in the early part of the comprehensive zoning bylaw "workshop," with many areas still remaining to discuss.

Started at 5 p.m., adjourned at 11. There had been people in the audience waiting all night for some of these items to come forward for discussion. Instead, they went home, likely frustrated at the time spent waiting for something that never even came up.

The structure of the meeting was awkward. After roughly four hours, we broke away from the public view to spend more than one hour behind closed doors with our lawyer, discussing several property-related and legal issues. During that time, the audience, the media and many members of staff simply had to wait. We returned to attempt to finish the remainder of the agenda.

Surely it would have been better to hold the in-camera session at the start, say begin early at 4 p.m. That way our lawyer can leave if he is no longer required - and we're not paying him $600-plus an hour to wait for his time to come. It would mean there is no break in the continuity of the remainder of the meeting.

It would also mean staff could attend the relevant portion of the meeting when they are required, and don't have to sit around while the in-camera session is on.

Keep in mind that the meeting is televised. With a lengthy in-camera meeting in the middle, the cameras have to be shut down, and the camera operator wait until council comes back, in order to start them again. Or sometimes the cameras are simply left on to show an empty room. Does this structure best serve the public?

The media, forced to sit and wait for us to exit the closed room, get bored and sometimes angry. That's not good for council's relationship with them. They could be at home with family or out with friends instead of sitting in a windowless room waiting for council to return from a meeting that council can't discuss or explain.

But wait, before we get back to business, we break for a coffee or tea, run outside to bring back food and drink to revive the nearly comatose councillors. The media chomp at their pens while we rush outside for refreshments.

Maybe the media can create a meeting bingo card like the picture on the right, and play it during meetings. It would have to be altered, of course to suit our circumstances. Some of the jargon could remain, however, like "low hanging fruit" but they'd need to add "rubber hits the road" and "get my head around it." Might keep them amused while we wrestle in-camera.

Or we could choose to hold the in-camera portion at the end of the meeting. Go behind closed doors at 10, after the public portion of the council business is completed. Have the lawyer and any staff required for that session show up a little earlier. The audience, media and unnecessary staff could then go home because the only thing left would be to approve the confirmatory bylaw and end the meeting.

Are long meetings better than holding more but shorter meetings? Why not consider two meetings a week when necessary? Surely we'd be more effective and more alert during two shorter meetings than at one marathon. Surely we'd be fresher and less scrappy at two shorter meetings. After four or five hours, we tend to be more confrontational simply because we're tired.

Maybe we should consider starting those council meetings that promise to be long at an earlier time, say 3 or even 1 p.m. That might not shorten the overall length, but it would mean everyone in attendance would be more awake and alert in the mid-afternoon than at 10 or 11 o'clock. And staff who aren't needed for the whole meeting could go home earlier.

Why didn't we move the late-night "workshop" - which we all expected to be a lengthy process - to another day. Give it a full day's attention: start at 9 a.m. and work through the day as long as necessary to complete it. We would have started it alert and fresh, not tired after four or five hours of sitzkrieg in council chambers. As it was, we barely scratched the surface of the proposed bylaw, and covered less than half the issues raised at the last meeting when it was discussed.

More to the point, we didn't actually approve or vote on anything in the proposed bylaw; merely perambulated around the topics. I was beginning to think we were using a proposed 'Community Improvement Plan"" (CIP) as the compost bin for ideas, rather than actually deciding how to deal with the issues we were stuffing into it.

We still have to meet again to actually make those decisions. And I'll be the next one is even longer.

If an in-camera session promises to be an hour or more as this one did, with seven items to discuss, why not hold it another day? Simply call a special meeting to deal with the in-camera issues. Hold it early in the day so we can get back to our jobs after it's over.

For me and for many at the table, Monday is already a very long day, even with a short meeting. I get up at 6, get to the store at 8 a.m., work until around 3, go home to walk the dog, change clothes and organize my laptop, then get to the council chambers around 4 to prepare, check email, talk with staff, reread notes, and eat dinner. By the time the meeting starts, I've been on the go nine hours already. When our meeting finished, at 11 p.m. last night, I had been working for 15 hours. I admit I wasn't as sharp as I would wish by then.

Why are our meetings so long? Aside from the simple fact that the business of the town has grown so long, so complicated and so demanding that we need more time to deal with it, that is. There are a lot of things in most council agendas. We cannot ignore or overlook them.*

But is the best solution to simply stack items on top of one another in a meeting until it reaches the six-hour capacity, or to break it into more digestible, shorter meetings on different days?

Here's a piece from an article on holding effective meetings:

Quote

Well, I suppose I'm guilty of a few of these, myself. Frankly it's difficult to keep focused and alert after so many hours, especially when comments become circuitous reiterations of what another speaker said. Attentions can wander**. I don't think any of us are cautious about exchanging ideas - but I believe after several hours, we become less able to effectively communicate them.

~~~~~
* The business of the town may require us to hold MORE meetings in a year, rather than fewer, as some councillors would prefer. It's a luxury to be able to take time off from meetings, such as our summer hiatus, but one this increasingly demanding role may not be able to afford much longer. But more, shorter meetings will be more effective than more marathons.
** O, then we bring forth weeds,
When our quick minds lie still;
Shakespeare: Antony and Cleopatra.[/indent]