Commissioners to trim fluff from meetings

Jeff Schweers

Tuesday, May 26, 1998 | 10:02 a.m.

Clark County officials are looking at ways to trim the fat out of commission meetings, which have a tendency of late to drag on for hours past their scheduled deadlines.

Controversial issues like massage industry regulations, airport noise overlay maps and zoning changes on Mount Charleston have produced long public debates where participants tend to repeat themselves and digress from the topic.

Commissioners don't want to limit public debate, but they do want to cut the fluff -- the good news and proclamations and recognitions that often take up the first hour of the commission's twice-monthly Tuesday hearings.

"Frankly, we spend too much time on commissioner recognition items and good news items," Commissioner Bruce Woodbury said. "There should be a limit to how much of that is done at any meeting so we can conduct the business people are there for."

Woodbury also noticed that such recognitions tend to proliferate during the election season.

"It's hard to control, especially in an election year," Woodbury said. "Commissioners have a natural tendency to do more commission recognition stuff."

Those people who took time out of their day to wait several hours for their item to be heard deserve the commission's consideration, Woodbury said. Also, the last items on the agenda that the board winds up rushing through to make up for lost time deserve more attention, Woodbury said.

"All I can figure out is there's been that many requests from commissioners and staff, and the advent of the videotaping of everything that goes on in the community that accompanies everything adds to the time," Woodbury said.

Limiting the number of recognitions on each agenda also made sense to Commission Chairwoman Yvonne Atkinson Gates.

"I think we can limit some of the proclamations and things we do, limit some of the good news stuff," Gates said. "I'm not saying it's not good, but after all, we have a lot of issues to deal with and those are far more important. We need to allow time to hear what people have to say on those issues."

Both Gates and Woodbury said they have discussed the issue with County Manager Dale Askew and Administrative Services Director Thom Reilly, whose office organizes the agenda.

"From time to time we have a situation where we have a lot of commission recognition items on the agenda," Askew said. "That has a tendency to drag on the meeting when there are so many at one time.

Askew said he directed Reilly to better plan how many recognition items are placed on a given agenda.

Reilly said the meetings have gotten longer because there are more items requiring debate and dialogue, such as the recent decision to build pedestrian bridges at the Flamingo Road intersection of the Las Vegas Strip. The discussion on that item lasted 90 minutes and wasn't the first time the item had been before the board.

"There are more complex issues now than a couple of years ago," Reilly said. "Since they're making these decisions, they need that dialogue and debate."

There has been no talk of cutting the public comment period, Reilly said. Commissioners already control public dialogue by limiting most speakers to no more than three minutes and cutting people off when they go off the point.

Instead, "there has been discussion about limiting the number of proclamations and county commissioner and manager recognitions (on each agenda)," he said.

Reilly said his staff is developing more stringent criteria for what issues need to rise to the level of an agenda item to better screen recognition requests from the different departments.

Some proclamations that don't have to go before a public hearing can just be presented to the individual receiving the award, Reilly said. But items that must be on the agenda, like the acceptance of donations, can be placed on the consent agenda -- where dozens of items are usually approved without discussion and in a single vote.

"Where we have discretion like good news item, proclamations ... where we have presentations we tell them to make them brief," Reilly said.

At least one commissioner likes the commissioner recognitions. Commissioner Myrna Williams, who spent 10 years in the Assembly where such awards are more commonplace, said the proclamations "are important enough that we ensure the public is aware of them."

However, Williams said she wouldn't object to finding another venue other than on the Tuesday business agenda or curtailing the amount of time involved in giving them out.

"We have to stop talking so much about it," Williams said.