Blog posting of last night’s Council Meeting

Posted by M Paradis

April 19, 2007

A good friend of mine attended last night’s Council meeting. I had asked him to blog the meeting as it was taking place so that I could post it to this site. Before he agreed, he asked me if he had to be careful of what he blogged. I told him no, as long as it was factual. What the heck was I thinking? : )

He sent me a copy of what he blogged - which will be posted after spell checked and a few corrections of who was speaking etc. I have to say that I actually had a good laugh! It was light hearted, funny and honest.

He had a very interesting perspective on the meeting and what we actually do (or attempt to do in some cases). Now, this person was not new to Council meetings so he had some sense of what occurs - but what was interesting was the amount of information discussed and actually voted on and the fact that even after our brief discussion of what we were voting on, the general public would still have really no idea how this effects them personally or as a community.

A perfect example of this was a resolution passed last night (Resolution #45-2007) that Opposed A-3857, which if enacted, would eliminate RCA’s as a tool to facilitate municipal compliance with Mount Laurel.

Now, this attendee of the meeting is sitting there and saying “What the heck is a RCA”? and more important “What is Mount Laurel”?

To be honest with you, after all these years of dealing with the term RCA (regional contribution agreements) COAH (Council On Affordable Housing) and the Mt. Laurel decision - it can get very confusing, which is why we hire professionals to help us understand and make good decisions.

Well, one thing that I took away from this experience is “how do we help our residents understand these topics”?

One way would be to go into a long and lengthy discussion during the Council meeting - not really practical for all in attendance. And I am sure no one would want me to drone on about these topics!

So instead, I decided to use this web site as a mechanism to document brief explanations of topics that come up in a meeting.

Hopefully you will find them useful.