A staff-level attempt to revamp the rules and procedures for Alamance County’s governing board has run aground with the board’s own members over its potential blow to public participation.
In the end, the board of commissioners resolved to give some more thought to these proposed protocols, which Alamance County’s manager Heidi York had unveiled at the board’s year-end meeting on Monday. All the same, the board’s members were unanimously opposed to one of York’s recommendations that would effectively strike one of the public comment periods that the commissioners currently hold at their semimonthly meetings.
The proposal that raised the board’s hackles concerned the potential redesignation of one of these two meetings as a “work session” where staff reports and board deliberations would take precedence to actual votes. York informed the commissioners that a number of other jurisdictions have introduced these work session meetings in order to dispense with long, complex presentations that can feel tedious when intermingled with items that demand immediate decisions…