From the Rhino Times (1/12/12): Two themes that are likely to continue during the administration of Mayor Robbie Perkins were displayed in the past week.
One was a series of meetings that each member of the City Council, including Perkins, had with Coliseum Manager Matt Brown and interim City Manager Denise Turner Roth. There is not a more inefficient way for the council to do business than to have councilmembers meet to hear essentially the same report from two senior city staff members. The interim city manager should have better things to do than to listen to Brown give the same report nine times. Brown should have better things to do than to give the same report nine times.
The reason for this enormous inefficiency appears to be that it was the only way the council could keep you, the public, from knowing what Brown was proposing.
City Council meetings, including meetings of committees of councilmembers, by law have to be open to the public. The City Council currently has its own policy that outlaws small group meetings closed to the public.
Under Mayor Keith Holliday and Mayor Carolyn Allen, the city manager would have set up meetings with three or four councilmembers at a time and gone over the material, cutting the number of meetings from nine to three or four. These were called small group meetings and were set up to allow the City Council to conduct the business of the city behind closed doors and circumvent the North Carolina open meetings law.