Meeting No. 2, Or Lack There Of

I recently attended a Tampa City Council Meeting to satisfy my second meeting requirement, and I was surprised at how this one went.

In my first meeting, I was exposed to a variety of different types of business, such as creating bike lanes for the Courtney Campbell Causeway, as well as many Tampa Improvement plans. It was a very interesting meeting to go to, to find out what was going on in my city.

My second meeting was not as intriguing.

Three of the chair people were missing from this meeting, which I feel helped add to the lack of productivity for the council. They only had five of the eight people attend the meeting, and most of the business regarded setting up dates to meet for the next couple of months.

I felt like that if I was attending a City Council meeting, that it should be packed full of business that needed to get done, but ended up leaving unsatisfied, and questioning what was so important to the council members that three had to miss it.

While at the meeting, I kept looking around at citizens who wanted their ideas and plans to be heard, just for them to get tabled at a later date.

I got the impression that if you are appointed to the City Council, that is should be a requirement for you to attend the City Council meetings, but there were three who did not feel the same way.

The Council did address the merging of the “Tampa Convention Center and Tourism Director and the Neighborhood Services Administrator to be called Convention Center, Tourism, Recreation and Cultural Administrator and the reorganization and renaming of various departments,” which seemed like a big deal to me, because I thought that it would mean job cuts.

If I were writing a piece for a newspaper on this part of the meeting, I would look into what this meant for the people that worked for the two departments, to see how many jobs that would cut, and who may have lost their jobs.

I would want to take a look at the budget’s for both departments, to see if there was any unnecessary spending that was taking place that could have been cut before those jobs were. I would also want the records of the Tampa Convention Center and Tourism Director as well as the records of the neighborhood Services Administrator. By examining these two positions, and who held them, you can begin to piece together information to tell you why the positions were joined, and to see why there was convergence.

Overall, I found an interesting story idea, with a great deal of public records behind it, but I also came out saddened by the attendance of the Council members.