I sent the following to members of Asheville City Council. Perhaps if I post it here somebody will read it.
I apologize, as I believe I was misunderstood.
If I were to characterize the typical member of city council, I would imagine a professional who spends 10-12 hours a day on the job, a community activist who attends at least three or four community meetings a day often giving keynote addresses, an intellectual who reads several books and journals a week, a volunteer who donates several hours a week for various organizations, somebody who serves proactively on about ten council committees, somebody who answers maybe 20-40 emails a day, somebody who can’t go to the grocery store without being hounded by constituents, somebody very active in their place of worship, and somebody who spends quality time with their nuclear and extended family and neighbors.
In the absence of time to conduct better research, I found from Wikipedia that the average adult American reads 250-300 words per minute. That means it takes them 2-3 minutes to read a page of prose, or 20-30 hours to read 600 pages. Last week’s city council agenda included over 600 pages of staff reports. Granted, some of the pages were PowerPoint presentations, but others were maps and large charts. I hope you all have faster and less cantakerous computers than I.
When I requested that reports be posted earlier than 3:00 Friday for Tuesday’s meeting, I was concerned about more than my learning disabilities. I was concerned that members of city council are not given the opportunity to do due diligence. Wiki adds, without citation, “Comprehension speeds have been assessed at 400 wpm for full comprehension, and research has shown that speed reading at 600 wpm can achieve about 70% comprehension and 50% comprehension at 1000 wpm.” You were not elected to comprehend less than 20% of the ordinances you would approve, bluffing and trusting that whatever staff produced would be copacetic. The public expects you to see what has been done in other municipalities, talk to experts, question assumptions, and ask hard questions. It was all I could do to pay eye-service to the staff reports last week, and I lead a very empty life.
As I’ve stated elsewhere, there is a point where too much information turns transparency to obfuscation, and I believe the new council has reached this point with its 500+ pages of reports per agenda. I have all the respect for Maggie Burleson and the Herculean efforts she makes on behalf of the city. However, it does me no good to receive the reports at 10:00am Friday if I don’t get off work until 5:00 or 6:00 anyway. Most peoples’ bosses don’t pay them to read council’s agendas.
What I really want is for the reports to be posted online a week or so before they go on council’s agenda. Plans adopted by council are on a par with law, which ideally is supposed to steer people away from harmful acts rather than add to the shelves of verbiage churned out so fast it must contain supercession and severability clauses. I would far prefer every plan and ordinance to go through three or four public shreddings than to watch my representatives bluff around and ask questions they would find answered in the reports if they would read them, which is not an unusual situation.
The bottom line is: I don’t want council voting on materials that are hot off the press. I would much prefer that citizens; particularly members of council, be given time to read, weigh, and consider. I apologize for this distraction, as I know you have 122 pages of material on domestic partner benefits to read this weekend, and many other demands on your time.
