Glass City Jungle

Ignazio Messina tackled the story of Council Attendance today in the Blade which if you followed the earlier reporting by Fox Toledo, Is Toledo Council Earning their Pay? you can come up with a good idea of the total numbers. As blogged about when Fox released the story, here, if you take both articles together, you get more direct numbers from the Fox Toledo coverage, especially if you watch all three news clips they had on this topic, but you can glean some additional numbers from today’s Blade article. Here’s what we have when you put what we know together:

Committee Meetings:

Frank Szollosi – 41 According to Fox
Michael Ashford -36 According to Fox
Phil Copeland – 32 According to Fox
Lindsay Webb – 22 According to Fox
Betty Shultz – Presumed less than 22 but more than 7
Tom Waniewski – Presumed less than 22 but more than 7
Wilma Brown – Presumed less than 22 but more than 7
George Sarantou – Presumed less than 22 but more than 7
Mark Sobczak – 7 According to Fox
Mike Crag – 7 According to Fox
Joe McNamara – 5 According to Fox
D. Michael Collins – 2 According to Fox

Council Meetings:

Betty Shultz – 3 According to Fox
Frank Szollosi -2 According to Fox
Phil Copeland – 2 According to Fox
Lindsay Webb – 1 Presumed by not having 2 and not having 0
Mark Sobczak – 1 Presumed by not having 2 and not having 0
Tom Waniewski – 1 Presumed by not having 2 and not having 0
Michael Ashford – 1 Presumed by not having 2 and not having 0
Wilma Brown – 0 According to Fox & Blade
D. Michael Collins – 0 According to Fox & Blade
Mike Craig – 0 According to Fox & Blade
Joe McNamara – 0 According to Fox & Blade
George Sarantou – 0 According to Fox & Blade

What neither media source covered that I was curious about is how many meetings are there actually in a year? There were 158 Meetings from January 01,2008 to November 18, 2008, 165 to the end of November, 183 total not counting Budget Townhalls or other public hearings, this is just Council Meetings, Agenda Review and the various formal Council Committee Hearings. Of course not every Council member is on every committee, and every committee meets a different number of times, so it would be much more difficult to calculate who missed what percentage of the meetings they were supposed to attend. If you were on a committee that met more often you could percentage wise have missed less than someone who was on committees that met less often.

I think what we can see is there are too many meetings. I know that part of the reasoning behind having 12 is so that every Council member chairs a committee, perhaps the ego aspect of that could be set aside for the sake of streamlining. Since I was at the Council Retreat, Mr. Messina was not, Tom Troy arrived for the Blade towards the end of the retreat, the discussion that took place on attendance focused on requiring some type of a reason for the non-attendance, it was accepted that there would be times when a Council member would not be able to attend. It also seems as if there could be better organization of when Council meetings are scheduled since Council is considered to be a part time position, those that do hold down other employment could find it difficult to go to meetings scheduled almost every day rather than meetings done on one or two days of the week.

It will be interesting to see where this goes, from what I understand there is an attempt to create some type of a form to document the reasons for a missed Committee or Council meeting…