As a continuation from a previous article regarding City Ordinances, a clarification from city alderman Bob Thomas and Mayor Butch Berry, interviewed separately, addresses city council meetings where Thomas and Berry were in dispute about what the mayoral role is during those meetings – Chair or Mayor?
ESI: Are existing ordinances being enforced?
Thomas: Very simply, council writes the rules and the mayor is responsible for enforcing them. If written rules are not being enforced, it is not only council’s responsibility to ask why, but also its obligation. If ordinances need to be changed, only council can change them.
Berry: “What rules aren’t being enforced? That horses aren’t allowed to be tied up to parking meters? This is not a new issue, this is an issue that has been going on for at least fifteen years. Council is a legislative body. They write the ordinances. The city is the administrative body.
“Council has written ordinances that are unenforceable. So are you saying it’s the mayor’s fault that these are unenforceable? A good example is the Clean City ordinance. You can have ordinances enacted, but if there is no method of paying for enforcement, they are not real workable. The ordinance is pretty vague when defining what is junk. We have to have a certain amount of leeway to be able to enforce ordinances.
“As far as I know I am one of the first mayors in twenty years who has come up with a method of paying for the work that needs to be done by allowing a tax lien on the properties when cleanup work is done by the city. The one thing that makes me madder than anything is to say, ‘We are selective in our enforcement.’ I do not believe that is true.”
ESI: Do ordinances and/or commission policies and procedures (P&P) need to be changed?
Thomas: “With regards to commission policies and procedures, the mayor can be a great resource. For example, the mayor can make the building inspector available to a commission; he can suggest changes to policies and procedures. However, the mayor has no control over, and is not responsible for, the operation of commissions. Parks, Hospital and the CAPC are virtually autonomous in terms of city supervision and take their direction largely from state statute. Other commissions, Planning/Zoning, HDC and Cemetery, operate under the auspices of City Code, which of course is council’s domain.
“There are some P&Ps that are internal to the individual commissions and require no ‘city’ approval. Whenever a P&P requires city approval, revision of an existing ordinance or approval of a new ordinance, it is council that has that authority, not the mayor.
“With the two questions in mind, the problem last night [Council meeting on 2/11/19] and almost always is that the majority of council treating or deferring to the Council Chair as the Mayor… not as the impartial Chair that he should be.
Berry: “City Code, once it is enacted, is not the council’s domain. That becomes administrative. Council’s domain is legislative.
“What Mr. Thomas has forgotten is that also the HDC is governed by not only state, but federal legislation. Mr. Thomas, according to Robert’s Rules of Order states the chairman, in this case the mayor defined by State Law, the mayor as the head of city council should not interject his opinions.
“There are times when I interject things, and he thinks that’s my opinion and I shouldn’t be doing that. It’s a matter of perception. Certain things come up that I think the council needs to be aware of. Are our ordinances serving the community well? I think so. They always need tweaking, but as far as our historic district goes, I think we have a good historic commission and a set of good guidelines that are based on federal guidelines.”