Time is not on their side


Monday night’s City Council meeting had such a light agenda that City Manager Eric Williams tried to cancel it, yet the meeting didn’t end until about 10:30.

That three-hour session came only a week after council members were together for almost six hours, from the start of the public forum on the 2004 audit at 5:30 until the end of the regular council meeting around 11:30.

That’s nine hours of talking and, perhaps, listening in a week. And don’t forget the lobbying trip Mayor Clem Seifert and council member Mike Rainey made to Washington in the middle of last week, a two-hour finance committee meeting Feb. 24 and another hour meeting for the finance and utilities committees Tuesday, and a Community Development Committee meeting Wednesday afternoon.

All of those gatherings are just a warm-up for an exhaustive meeting schedule to prepare the budget, and the revival of Speak Up Henderson will put pressure on council members to join the mayor at the Municipal Building at 6 on meeting Mondays, 90 minutes earlier than they’re used to.

So it was rude but not surprising that some council members groaned, rolled their eyes and rubbed their heads Monday night as Elissa Yount ran through a laundry list of important issues she had waited a week to discuss.

Yount said she was sorry to frustrate her colleagues, but “I feel like as a council member that this agenda is not often driven by what the people need.”

At least we people of Henderson can be happy we’re not paying the council and mayor by the hour.