Council Meets on Eve of Primary

On Jan. 24, when Councilman Rashid Burney heard City Clerk Laddie Wyatt announce the next City Council meeting would be Feb. 4, he said, “That’s the day before the primary!”

Burney is the lead person locally for the presidential campaign of Barack Obama and one can guess that the final hours before the primary are precious to him.

But the meeting was duly advertised in a legal notice.

So along comes the agenda, which Burney scans and publishes on his web site as a public service, and the proposed 2008 calendar has this week marked for an election hiatus for the presidential primary. Similar breaks are traditional for the June primary and the November general election.

Just another calendar glitch in the ongoing debate over when to meet …

If the council approves the calendar Wednesday, it will have to be changed by ordinance back to the Mondays-only schedule used for decades before it was switched in 2006 to a Monday-Wednesday plan. The change will not be complete for several more weeks.

--Bernice Paglia