9:00am | You know how you can tell you’re having a bad day as a City Hall reporter? When you manage to make Val Lerch unhappy with you. It’s like having a kindly uncle tell you that you suck.
Yesterday, I sat down to write a column on City Council attendance rates during the last two-year Council term. No drawn out conclusions and no opinions. Just a short article based on a huge spreadsheet built with data from the minutes of every single Council meeting between July 15, 2008 and July 13, 2010.
The problem is, my figures were wrong. In some cases, really wrong.
In checking all those meetings I counted each Councilmember not present during each meeting’s first roll call as absent for the whole meeting.
After we posted the article, Councilmembers, city staff and readers alike let me know that was pretty stupid. Well, actually, really stupid. And I totally agree.
Why? Because in 39 instances the Councilmembers that I counted as absent actually showed up within 15 minutes of the first roll call and were, in fact, present for the majority of the particular meetings.
So, while the percentages in yesterday’s article were mathematically accurate, they were, in the end, meaningless because they were based on my own faulty assumptions and input.
So, today, I’m here to fall on my sword, say mea culpa, and correct my errors.
It turns out that the full Council, with the Mayor presiding, actually met 43 of 76 times during the last term when you include the attendance of the late arrivals. This is a 56.6-percent full attendance rate–more than 17 percentage points better than I reported yesterday.
If you only count the meetings where the full Council met but the Mayor was absent, the full attendance rate for the Council jumps to 59.2-percent during the two-year term (this includes considering a full Council as eight members during the 13 meetings the 1st District seat was vacant). This is, again, more than 17 percentage points better than yesterday’s article stated.
And as one of the Councilmembers’ staff pointed out yesterday, all of the Councilmembers actually had a better than 90-percent attendance rate.
Individual attendance rates for the Councilmembers actually ranged from 100-percent for former 9th District Councilmember Val Lerch to 90.8-percent for 8th District Councilmember Rae Gabelich.
Here are the recalculated attendance rates for the other Councilmembers after including any meetings to which they arrived late:
Bonnie Lowenthal, 1st District – 92.9 percent (based on 14 meetings through Nov. 14, 2008)
Robert Garcia, 1st District – 93.9 percent (based on 49 meetings from April 7, 2009)
Suja Lowenthal, 2nd District – 93.4 percent
Gary DeLong, 3rd District – 93.4 percent
Patrick O’Donnell, 4th District – 94.7 percent
Gerrie Schipske, 5th District – 96.1 percent
Dee Andrews, 6th District – 96.1 percent
Tonia Reyes-Uranga, 7th District – 92.1 percent
A hypothetical average Councilmember during the last term attended about 72 of 76 meetings and had an average 94.3-percent attendance rate.
For the sake of comparison, an average full-time worker that uses 10 sick days a year would have an attendance rate of just under 96-percent. To be fair, a Councilmember could only miss three meetings during the last term to achieve a 96-percent attendance rate.
For his part, Mayor Foster missed just 10 of 76 meetings during the last term for an attendance rate of 86.8-percent.
Now, many of you asked what this means or what is the point of all this information. Well, you and I voted for and are paying the Councilmembers and Mayor to represent our interests. One of the most important things they do, and some would argue this point, is conduct public Council meetings.
The above information clearly shows that the City Councilmembers and Mayor take their attendance at City Council meetings as an important part of their jobs.
As a side note: one of the ironies to come out of this is that while Councilmembers are part-time and most have day jobs they have to maintain, the full-time Mayor has the lowest attendance rate at City Council meetings. To be fair, though, the Mayor also has a day job (you know–being Mayor) and as the ceremonial head of the city he has many duties that might require him to miss a Council meeting. That’s why we have the Vice-Mayor position after all.
As to the meaning of the low number of Council meetings having a full Council in attendance, these numbers are not really an indication of anything other than perhaps proof that trying to align the schedules of nine part-time Councilmembers and a full-time Mayor are somewhat difficult over a two-year stretch.
In fact, when you consider the number of absent Councilmembers per meeting, it is even more clear that the vast majority of Council meetings are well attended. Over the last two-year term there were only nine meetings, about 11-percent, that had seven or less Councilmembers present.
As one commenter pointed out yesterday about the Council, “This is not [the City of] Bell.”
You’re absolutely right, and the above information proves it–at least as far as attendance.
The bottom line is that yesterday’s article was flawed from the get go and you the reader deserve better.
So, to CityBeat readers, I promise that I will do my very best to make sure something this sloppy does not happen again. And to the Councilmembers (and Mayor) I may have slighted in reporting inaccurate data, I apologize. Especially to Val Lerch. Because I really don’t want anyone who can still smile after sitting through 76 consecutive City Council meetings to think I suck.
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