I have been speaking at Urbana Civil Service Commission meetings for the past several months. I have been making the general point that City of Urbana employees, especially those with the primary task of engaging with the community, tend to always work in the direction of protecting themselves and fellow employees rather than working toward the interests of the residents of Urbana.
The Civil Service Commission (CSC) is not accustomed to public input at their meetings. Before COVID, they held their meetings in a conference room on the 2nd floor of the Urbana City Building, behind a locked door (yes, this was definitely a violation of the Open Meetings Act). They also never followed their set meeting schedule, and tended to move their meetings to new times with only 48 hours notice. All of these things made it nearly impossible for anyone to attend their meetings. They also never recorded any of their meetings, so reviewing a meeting after the fact was not possible.
COVID brought one good thing to public meetings in Illinois: the Attorney General began requiring public bodies to record all meetings. With virtual access, it is now also possible to attend meetings that would usually be held semi-privately, such as the Urbana CSC meetings.
Now that I can attend CSC meetings, I’ve found that the three board members (Tom Betz, Marion Knight, and Traci Nally) appear to be almost entirely clueless. They merely rubber-stamp job descriptions that are written by City staff. Their meetings rarely span beyond 10 minutes, and they have no clue how to deal with public input. They don’t appear to have any sense of personal responsibility and it isn’t clear that they care at all about their assigned task.
More than two months ago, I sent a complaint to the Urbana Human Relations Commission alleging that the CSC had included discriminatory language in their city employment requirements. I raised that issue at the October 28th CSC meeting during public input
I also raised the issue of Mayor Marlin’s new meeting rules, which clearly violate the Open Meetings Act. I pointed out that since two of the sitting CSC members (Tom Betz and Traci Nally) are attorneys, perhaps they have opinions on those speech regulations.
The CSC responded exactly as we’ve come to expect from our public bodies: “it’s not our problem”, “we don’t work here”, “we’re not in charge of that”, “I’m shrugging my shoulders now because I don’t know how to be a community leader”, etc….
-Christopher Hansen, Urbana
The October 26th Urbana Civil Service Commission meeting can be viewed here: