I’m disappointed that this Council has chosen to host a Special Called Emergency meeting of the Council for tomorrow night (Wednesday) instead of making it happen on your regular meeting night of Tuesday (tonight).

With a Tuesday night meeting there’s a strong chance that the public would have been noticed in their normal way about the meeting and the agenda.

In this way the public would have had an opportunity to communicate with their elected leaders.  Emails, phone calls or visits to Casper’s could have been arranged so our elected representatives might hear from more than their standard advisors.

With only about 30 hours notice about a meeting that will be held at the same time as other community meetings, I fear that the Council chambers will be filled mostly with people either in the know or a part of the inner circle of advisors.  The general public may not even know to watch this meeting on TV until they read about it in the paper at the end of the week.

I’ve spoke several times about the need for transparency in government with my comments prompted by these “emergency” meetings or with items thrown onto the agenda at the last minute so the public can’t even sign up to speak.  It’s as if my concerns are being ignored or are of little concern to the people running Richmond.

Did something happen in the past couple of days that was not available last week when the meeting could have been regularly agendized and noticed?

Perhaps by hosting this meeting on an off day and with little notice there might be fewer news cameras filming the crazies for their 10:00 news or perhaps the print media might not get the word and miss their chance to report on our problems.

This meeting should have been held yesterday and the public should have been given fair notice.  You know this is the right thing to do.

Don Gosney

Richmond Resident