PRINCETON: Council changes time and format of meetings

By Victoria Hurley-Schubert, Staff Writer
   To promote transparency and good government, the Borough Council is rearranging its meeting format and starting earlier in the evening.
   Meetings will now begin at 7 p.m. and the closed session portions of the meeting will take place at the end of the night.
   ”I think it will achieve a number of important goals,” said Heather Howard as she made the suggestion. “It will lead to better decision making. We won’t be making decisions at 10 or 11 o’clock at night when I don’t think any of us are at our best.”
   She said an earlier start time would also be more family friendly and, most importantly, encourage “transparency and good government.”
   ”We would prioritize the public meeting over the closed meeting,” she said. “The most important of what we do is have our meetings in public and promote the time when we are deliberating with you all present.”
   Councilman Roger Martindell expressed concern a time change would not be cost-effective, especially with attorneys fees and rearranging the order of the meetings to impair the council’s ability to deal with what he calls “the most sensitive and expensive issues” in closed session.
   ”If we are going to have a closed session, frequently we are in closed session with our attorneys. The attorneys would not come out at 9 or 10. They would be here from 6 o’clock on and we’d be paying them at $150 to $200 an hour every single meeting they would attend a closed session,” he said. “That’s $600 sitting around for four hours doing nothing. That’s not in the public’s interest.”
   He also said the council keeps to its schedule and if the meeting is called to begin at 7:30, they end their closed session and begin the public portion of the meeting.
   ”We punctually, regularly, almost uniformly come out (of early closed session) at 7:30, nobody is left waiting,” he said.
   Councilwoman Jo Butler said the council makes decisions in public late at night.
   ”Roger made a good point about making decisions late at night, but what we vote on in public are really critical decisions and we’ve often made those at 11 o’clock at night or later,” said Ms. Butler. “I don’t always think we’ve made the best decisions then.
   ”If we meet later in closed session and feel the discussion is deadlocked or we’ve reached a decision where we don’t feel comfortable where we are, we can always postpone, which is something we don’t do in the public meetings as much. We go ahead and have a vote because all of you have shown up and want to hear what the decision is, so at 11 or 12 o’clock at night we’re making a decision. In closed session we can say we’ve had enough maybe we should carry this to next week.”
   Kristin Appelget, director of community and regional affairs at Princeton University, who attends almost every Borough Council meeting on her employer’s behalf, said in her experience — she served on West Windsor council — closed sessions were more efficient at the end of the meeting because the council people wanted to go home.
   She also said the closed session at the end of the meeting will give the council extra time to digest papers that are given to them before they are expected to come out of the closed session and vote upon.
   Councilwoman Barbara Trelstad said she would like to give the new format a try and “see if we are too tired to do our closed session business at 10 o’clock.”
   Surrounding communities who have the open session first are the test cases the borough can look at as examples, said Councilwoman Jenny Crumiller. “If it’s not working, we can revisit the issue. We can at least have tried it,” she said.