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Gladys McGillicutty's avatar

Reid gets the occasional thing right, but his lack of pragmatism on tonnes of issues (like, say, his advocacy for a ban on cashless businesses) plus his frequent temper-tantrums shows to me that he is not a serious character.

He seems to scour the news for whatever new thing is being tried in Berkeley, Brooklyn, or San Fran and tries to push it in Evanston without the slightest regard for whether the conditions in Evanston may be different.

He was an unmitigated disaster as Clerk--posting sexual assault victims' names and unredacted minors' arrest records on the internet. He royally screwed up the basic elements of the clerk's job such as taking minutes for council meetings and fulfilling FOIAs.

Maybe I shouldn't have been, but I was amazed that he was elected to clerk given his lack of experience in the workplace and his campaign focused on stuff not even related to being clerk, like affordable housing.

The only reason he got elected clerk was because he was successfully able to leverage a problematic encounter with EPD to exploit the liberal guilt of the average Evanston resident.

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Tom Hayden's avatar

I don't disagree with all of these things but we *also* have to be pragmatists and work with the alderman you have not the alderman you want. In this case, he was spot on and did the right thing. Give the guy a W today.

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Paul Breslin's avatar

Yes, but then he floated a motion to restrict citizen comment to 30 minutes instead of 45. I can't figure the guy out.

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Tom Hayden's avatar

I mean there were nazis zoom bombing the whole citizen comment thing!

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Paul Breslin's avatar

I have corresponded with Biss about this problem. I suggested he should rule the hateful comments out of order, not because they are offensive (which opens the 1st Amendment can of worms), but because they are irrelevant. (Nothing on the agenda to consider whether rabbis crawl up from sewers, etc.)

He replied that unfortunately, an OMA counselor had said that any restriction of content would be a violation.

I found only one sentence in the OMA about rights of non-members attending an open meeting, at 5 ILCS 5, sec 2.06 (g): “Any person shall be permitted an opportunity to address public officials under the rules established and recorded by the public body.” So if you flout those rules, you forfeit your right to speak, There’s nothing in the OMA that says all subject matter must be permitted.

Robert’s Rules is quite emphatic: in Section 61.19 it says “An assembly has the right to protect itself from annoyance by nonmembers.” The chair “has the power to require nonmembers to leave the hall, or to order their removal . . . and the nonmembers have no right of appeal from such an order of the presiding officer.”

So Biss reserves the right to shut us up, but has no plan to silence the Nazis?

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Tom Hayden's avatar

I think it will be moot shortly since they seem to have moved on

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Paul Breslin's avatar

I sure hope you’re right!

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