City Council should guard against future deadlocks

When Lavonta Williams takes her oath this morning and joins the Wichita City Council, representing District 1, the council membership will be complete for the first time since former District 5 council member Bob Martz died in January. It will be good to see the community fully represented again. But council members should not forget the pain involved in picking a successor for Mayor Carl Brewer as District 1 member, with its maddening 20 tie votes one week and magical unanimity the next. Council members should adopt a strategy for the future to deal with tie votes. And, as council member Jim Skelton has stressed, there remains a need to review and update council policies more broadly, before the next procedural crisis strikes.
Posted by Rhonda Holman

3 Comments

  1. getusetoit
    Posted June 26, 2007 at 8:25 am | Permalink

    Don’t know why you would be upset. Carl Brewer has proven that he has his lackeys in order and they will do as he tells them to do.

  2. Frank Furter
    Posted June 26, 2007 at 9:20 am | Permalink

    getusedtoit just points out to the idiocy in this town. The day after the 20 vote farce, everyone was hollering about Brewer’s lack of leadership because of the deadlock. Now, the other councilmembers are his lackeys, because he did show leadership. City ordinance should call for a special election of the affected district is such circumstances. However, since it does not, Council was correct in deferring to his candidate. It was his district and he knows that district’s views. Imagine what the outcry would have been if Council would have voted put a Democrat in Martz’s open seat.

  3. mrcontroversy
    Posted June 26, 2007 at 5:37 pm | Permalink

    Brewer’s got nothing to do with it.It’s staff’s world; the rest of us just live in it.Remember, Brewer promised us in an op-ed piece in the Eagle “personnel issues will be dealt with” in the bowling fiasco.They’ve been dealt with the same way they’ve been “dealt with” in the past–by doing nothing.