Three hours into last Monday’s city council meeting, Mayor Sumbul Siddiqui faced a tricky task when presiding over Cambridge councillors: reining in debate.

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“I don’t want to hear from anyone anymore,” she said dryly.

The sense of irony was strong in the room. Councillors were discussing new rules proposed by Councillor Jivan Sobrinho-Wheeler, chair of the government operations committee, including one controversial provision to end Monday council meetings at 10 p.m. and restart them if necessary at noon the next day. There were still other agenda items to discuss, the longer they failed to reach agreement, the longer this meeting would run.

Sobrinho-Wheeler put forth these rules because “the way we do business is extremely disrespectful to city staff,” he said. “I want to make that really clear as a moral imperative.”

While there have been epic council meetings lasting until well after midnight, so far this term the longest meeting has run five-and-a-half hours. One finished in less than 60 minutes. On average, they’ve run about four hours, ending at about 9:30. But city staff who serve the councillors are often there having worked a full day already, and city department staffers sometimes have to wait around in case the council has questions for them on relevant agenda items, only to have those bumped to the following week’s agenda.

There was also a rule being discussed that would limit councillors to five minutes when they have the floor as well as restrict the number of times they can speak to an agenda item.

Naptime suggested

Sobrinho-Wheeler originally proposed the rules at the May 11 meeting, including a 9 p.m. cut-off time. But councillor Timothy Flaherty took exception to that early end time and exercised his charter right, pushing discussion to May 18.

Flaherty told voters during the campaign that if elected, he would continue working as a criminal defense attorney. If council business were to be conducted during the day on Tuesdays, “people that voted for me may be disenfranchised because I am on occasion not going to be present for a city council meeting” due to his day job, he said. Instead, he suggested “If anybody here is tired and wants to go home and take a nap, go home and take a nap. I’ll be here.”

“On that note … ,” Siddiqui quipped, getting up from her chair and pretending to see herself out.

Lengthy debate about debate length

Sobrinho-Wheeler also proposed limiting councillors to being acknowledged no more than twice on any given topic. Debate on this subject at the May 18 meeting went on for more than an hour. A change proposed by councillor Ayah Al-Zubi allowing for more debate at the discretion of the mayor failed.

While Sobrinho-Wheeler, Siddiqui and Al-Zubi seemed keen to continue, other councillors were not. Flaherty, speaking “in the spirit of collaboration and comedy,” successfully moved to table the matter, meaning it would be on the agenda again on June 1, after the Memorial Day holiday break.

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At the June 1 meeting, a frustrated Sobrinho-Wheeler pushed to get the rules passed, noting that council had completed 25 percent of its term. He had worked with City Solicitor Meghan Bayer to create new language about how to handle agenda items not resolved before 10 p.m. The suggestion was to have the mayor determine whether to schedule a Tuesday meeting after reviewing the agenda when it is released at the end of the preceding week, and to use Thursday as a potential extra meeting day.

But when Sobrinho-Wheeler’s moved to “call the question,” thus ending debate and moving the remaining amendments to an immediate vote, the motion failed.

“We’re hard to corral”

Debate continued, with councillor E. Denise Simmons calling the prospect of Thursday meetings a “recipe for disaster” that would lead to even more debate and confusion.

“There’s the council that we want to be and there’s the council that we are,” Simmons said. “We’re hard to corral.”

Then councillors recognized that they already had the authority to schedule additional meetings if needed through the process of suspending the rules. Doing so requires a five-vote majority, but it’s a process council frequently uses to do things like discuss items in a different order than is on the agenda.

“Nothing in the amended version [of the rule] is anything more than what you have the power to do in terms of recessing the meeting and then calling a different meeting,” said City Manager Yi-An Huang.

The new rule simply reads “The City Council meeting shall start on Monday at 5:30 p.m. and shall continue until either the conclusion of all business on the agenda or until the meeting recesses at 10 p.m., whichever occurs sooner.”

Councillors finally voted (unanimously) to adopt the slate of new rules.

It is unclear what will change in practice, since councillors could suspend the rules to extend the duration of Monday night meetings.

However, the five-minute time limit almost immediately had an impact on council business, being enforced (on councillor Cathie Zusy) just 10 minutes after the new rules were adopted.

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