Message And Decorum Lost
When Name Calling Begins
Decorum: (noun) (2) Propriety and good taste in conduct or appearance (3) orderliness.
There isn’t much to the job description of a City Council President. You are chosen by a vote of your fellow Council members to chair the meetings of the Council. They give you a gavel and a set of rules and beyond that you get by on a winning smile and a prayer.
One of those rules (rule 9) says that the Council President is responsible for maintaining “decorum” at the meetings. The dictionary definition of the word leads off this week’s column.
How you maintain decorum is the trick. People can’t agree on what it should be...they only recognize it when it isn’t there.
I’ve tried watching meetings of the St. Peters Board of Aldermen, but sometimes it is just too painful. They have a regular cast of characters that speak for however long they care to about whatever they care to, while the public’s business gets pushed later and later into the evening.
I have a lot of respect for the members of the St. Peters Board of Aldermen. How they have the patience to sit through hours of nonsense is beyond me. They then have to take up even more of the time devoted to doing the work they were elected to do, in order to defend themselves from those who would demean or defame them. Their meetings are almost being held hostage by people who never ran for office and otherwise would probably never hold a public office themselves.
John Sonderegger has never felt constrained in allowing two diametrically opposed views to occupy the same space in his column. Last week he chided the Mayor of St. Peters for not maintaining “decorum” in their meetings, while criticizing me for enforcing Council Rule forty-nine against two individuals for making defamatory comments about individuals during public comment.
All I can think is that John Sonderegger and Roland Wetzel must be getting ready to form a local chapter of the ACLU. The latest issue of Mr. Wetzel’s newspaper, quoted by John Sonderegger, takes up the cause of those who want to use the Council meetings to make personal attacks against individuals, saying that the State Constitution prohibits anyone from constraining free speech. Of course the Missouri General Assembly doesn’t have any time for public comment on the floor of the House or Senate. I also don’t know how asking people to be civil constrains their freedom.
We require speakers to wear clothing, which no doubt rubs nudists the wrong way.
The two speakers in question are leaders of and helping bankroll a recall effort against two members of the Council. The stated reason, to the press and in their own mailings, for wanting to recall Councilman Brown in Ward 3, is that he used the word “cesspool” to loosely describe the operations of a city department.
On the night that occurred I called Councilman Brown out of order. There is Council Rule twenty-five that says members should avoid “disparaging, offensive or slanderous statements.” The night of the meeting when Councilman Brown called problems within public works a “cesspool” Councilman Kneemiller immediately and emphatically decried Mr. Brown’s choice of words. He also misconstrued Mr. Brown’s intent to criticize problems rather than individual workers. I called Mr. Brown out of order due to Mr. Kneemiller’s lurid response. Later, Mr. Brown’s comments would ring true when evidence of tampering with his files came to light.
On numerous occasions since then, he has gone out of his way to praise the activities of individual employees and has assured people that his intent was not meant to reflect on individual employees. In other words, I think he was sorry and everyone can go on about their lives.
But no. His one remark became the centerpiece of the most unjustified recall effort since...well since the unjustified recall effort against Councilwoman Greer being funded by the same group.
Now the part I find hypocritical is that these same citizens wanting the recall Mark Brown for saying something they found offensive at a Council meeting, want to stand up before the Council and question the “character” and “honesty” of individual Council members and not be called out of order the way Councilman Brown was.
Maybe John Sonderegger and Roland Wetzel, if they form a chapter of the ACLU, will champion getting rid of the rule that the Council President has to maintain decorum altogether. We could then have a parade of speakers from the Ku Klux Klan, to flag burning radicals and Jerry Springer could be guest host.
What regular viewers or attendees at meetings of the City Council already know, is that I am the most reluctant person to use a gavel you will ever find. I can count on one hand the number of times I have had to use the gavel to bring someone to order. I was thinking about sending it to John ‘Spanky” Sonderegger as a present this Christmas so he can use it to conduct meetings of the “He Man Woman Haters Club” with Alfalfa and the gang.
P.S. Darla and Dottie aren’t invited.
