Civility takes a hit at Biomass hearing
Considering hosting our own public forum to make sense of the Tallahassee controversy on Biomass, I attended last night’s City Commission meeting that allowed public testimony on the topic. If you’ve got four hours (and a couple of Valium) you can watch it yourself courtesy of The Tallahassee Democrat.
The majority of discussion was respectful and civil – if not always entirely factual – although there were enough really bad moments that most of the commissioners felt the need to comment on the lack of civility as the meeting ended.
Mayor Marks:
“There were a lot of things said tonight. And a lot of them were accurate and a lot of them were inaccurate…”
“…It is clear there is a lot of misinformation, misleading information, bad information out in the public sector… some of it in my opinion was presented to the public deliberately in an attempt to confuse the public. And that’s troublesome to me. I’ve even had people fundamentally tell us that’s what they wanted to do… We will have civil, orderly procedures in these chambers. I will not tolerate anything else. That’s what our citizens expect and this is what we’re going to have.”
Commissioner Andrew Gillum:
“I think that the relationship between public officials and the public is a sacred one… We do a lot of things throughout the week and in our time as elected officials and sometimes people disagree with those things and sometimes people agree. What I wholeheartedly disagree with is demagoguing of people who give their time and their lives because they care and their talents to this community and at the first disagreement, they’re demagogued. They’re called baby killers, they’re don’t they don’t care about black people, they’re told they don’t care about kids and so many other things. And I think those are things that I reject are completely untrue and certainly not representative of the elected officials who serve on this body.”
Commissioner Debbie Lightsey:
“All the right and the wrong, the pros and the cons are never on one side of the equation. If they were this would be an easy job and I will tell you it is not easy… Part of the problem here is the public has not received adequate information to date. Some of the information I think should be very reassuring to many of you. Some of these things aren’t a matter of judgment, they are a matter of fact. You can look at what’s going to be burned, you can look at the emissions, you can look at all those kinds of things. This is factual information. There are plants like this in operation. It’s not he said she said. In this world there are still things that are fact and things that are factually incorrect and we need to sort those out here tonight. Because I’ve heard a lot of stuff that was not factually correct and in my view was stated to be alarming as opposed to informative. I told everyone that before this discussion to tonight what I wanted to hear from people was their view on this but that I expected people to be civil and honest. To a huge degree everybody complied this that, but there were a couple of exceptions. And I have noted those, as I always do and I don’t appreciate that. And you have no credibility in my book when you behave that way in these chambers. We’re here trying to make a hard decision that balances a lot of issues in this community and we’re doing the best we can. I expect everybody when we have this next public hearing to be civil, to discuss this on the merits, to not make snide personal remarks that get you no where here, in fact it discredits your position and you need to recognize that.”
Add comment December 11th, 2008
