Is Your Alder Doing their Job? (Part One)

It’s really hard to find out! I noticed my alder and a couple others missing a lot of meetings and I was interested in finding out how many. It’s not as easy as you would think . . . thus, the three part series.

So, you’d think you could just go to a computer and print off a list of meetings missed, right? Wrong.

That list of absences for this term through mid-July is here. But there are several caveats to it. The first explanation comes from council staff:

Ms. Konkel,
Please find attached a PDF of the information you requested.

If you have a specific question about a particular meeting you will need to review the meeting minutes or contact the staff to the committee in question.

This Legistar report captures initial attendance, attendance of an alder who may have come in late and roll call attendance.

What does that mean in plain language? Well, here’s an example.
1. There’s 9 people on the committee. They take roll call when 7 are present. That’s roll call one for the meeting.

2. 15 minutes later, the 8th person arrives, they “take roll call” again for the meeting.

3. They vote on something and its a roll call vote, so the roll call is taken again.

4. 25 minutes later, the alder shows up. They have now been recorded as being absent three times, for one meeting that they were 25 minutes late for.

It gets even more useless, as this information is not included for:
– Ad hoc committees
– Appointments to committees that are not exclusively city appointments

Also, sometimes, the initial roll call is taken, and then they never corrected it for late arrivals.

And, if there are no minutes yet, sometimes the alders show up as being absent.

I’m sure there are even more reasons this report is screwed up and useless, but, since the information is so elusive, here’s what it says, as a starting point and perhaps a comparison measure. I’ve got three more sources of information that I’m still sorting through to get to the bottom of this. And one, that is no longer made available to the public since Schumacher-gate.

So, take this all with a grain of salt. Or two. The numbers are the actual number of roll calls and then the percent of roll calls in each category.

Brian Solomon
Absent 32 22%
Excused 33 22%
Present 79 54%

Julia Kerr
Absent 4 2%
Excused 52 38%
Present 78 58%

Judy Compton
Absent 17 11%
Excused 40 27%
Present 88 60%

Michael Schumacher
Absent 10 5%
Excused 61 32%
Present 118 62%

Tim Bruer
Absent 33 18%
Excused 19 10%
Present 128 71%

Bridget Maniaci
Absent 27 17%
Excused 13 8%
Present 111 73%

Lauren Cnare
Absent 19 12%
Excused 16 10%
Present 123 77%

Thuy Pham-Remmele
Absent 1 1%
Excused 10 18%
Present 42 79%

Jed Sanborn
Absent 15 16%
Excused 4 4%
Present 74 79%

Joe Claussius
Absent 9 6%
Excused 18 12%
Present 119 81%

Mark Clear
Absent 11 6%
Excused 16 9%
Present 138 83%

Paul Skidmore
Absent 7 5%
Excused 15 11%
Present 109 83%

Shiva Bidar-Sielaff
Absent 12 7%
Excused 13 7%
Present 139 84%

Mike Verveer
Absent 15 10%
Excused 7 4%
Present 119 84%

Larry Palm
Absent 4 3%
Excused 14 11%
Present 107 85%

Marsha Rummel
Absent 11 4%
Excused 23 9%
Present 203 85%

Brian Eagon
Absent 1 0%
Excused 15 12%
Present 108 87%

Satya Rhodes-Conway
Absent 8 7%
Excused 4 3%
Present 101 89%

Chris Schmidt
Excused 9 8%
Present 96 91%

Steve King
Excused 3 4%
Present 58 95%

You’d think the more meetings you had to attend, the worse your record might be, but that didn’t really work our either. Well, my search continues . . . look for part II and III. As the information gets harder and harder to come by (i.e. takes more time to compile).