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Consideration of amendments to the 2024 Common Council meeting calendar
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Submitted by:
Jim Archambo, City Administrator
Steve Braatz, City Clerk
Department:
Administration & City Clerk
A. Issue
On July 2, 2024 the Common Council adopted an ordinance modifying Secs. 2.02.070, 2.02.100, 2.02.120, and 2.24.030 of the Wauwatosa Municipal Code. These modifications, among other things, relate to the meeting dates and times of the Common Council and Council standing committees and enable the Common Council to set its meeting calendar via resolution.
As a result, staff have developed a prototype meeting calendar for the remainder of 2024 which reflects the flexibility that the recent ordinance adoption created as it relates to the accommodation of the frequency and duration of meetings in recent years. This is not to diminish the overall quantity or quality of committee and council work but to organize it more effectively. This is a first draft for the committee to consider and modify as it sees fit.
B. Background/Options
Some benefits of the proposed calendar include 6:30 PM start times for Common Council meetings, additional opportunities for discussion at the committee level, and greater flexibility to move meetings around holidays and elections. More specifically, this model provides Council members with opportunities for attending meetings of committees on which they don't serve, if desired.
For reference when reviewing the draft calendar, attached in this legislative file is a chart detailing the meeting occurrences and cancellations of the Council standing committees, Plan Commission, Board of Public Works, Common Council, and Committee of the Whole from 2018 through 2024.
On a related note, there were fifteen Common Council meetings without a public hearing on the agenda in 2023. The average time of those meetings was 36.7 minutes, however, two of those fifteen meetings were over two hours in duration. Removing those two meetings from the ...
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