Common Council Recap – Uh . . .

All I can say is I have no idea how the meeting took two hours. No. freaking. clue.

– We heard a few people speak to us about the capital budget and how we are spending way too much money we don’t have on roads we don’t need.
– We sent back an appointment (Curt Brink), to CARPC – well, kind of, but not a word was said about it.
– We placed the light bulb ordinance on file (it’s dead), without any discussion at all. But, the city attorney basically said we couldn’t do it in a memo to us.
– There were two neighborhood issues. One took 45 minutes over something we didn’t have any authority to do anything about anyways. (The Parks Commission had the authority.)
– We borrowed $58M for our $94M 2008 Capital Budget. This was the most significant action, but again, not a word except a request by me to have the comptroller explain even tho I had just heard the explanation 10 minutes before the council meeting with 4 o my colleagues. The good news is that we kept our AAA bond rating and the notes were at a 3.8% interest rate, which is just a little more than last year’s 3.71% interest rate.
– The ordinance to double the parking tickets and tow cars was referred. Without discussion.

That’s it. Really, I don’t know how this took us two hours. There was much babbling with no apparent purpose.

Afterwards Rummel, Clear, Gruber, Bruer, Schumacher and me went to the Great Dane.