At the Urbana Committee of the Whole meeting on January 19th, City Administrator Carol Mitten brought forth an ordinance change that would exempt City employees, elected officials, and appointed board members from being subject to anti-discrimination laws. Check CU has covered this issue in several articles, and this most recent article gives some backstory on Mitten’s presentation:
Urbana Administrator Pushes to Exempt City from Anti-Discrimination Laws
Mitten met with City Council members in groups of two over the weekend before the January 19th meeting, and apparently never disclosed to the Council members that the Human Relations Commission (HRC) produced two variations of the ordinance change: one that exempted the City agents, and one that included the City agents.
Not only did Mitten fail to mention the latter option, she completely omitted it from her “memorandum” to the Council on January 14th. The Council only became aware of the second option when HRC co-Chair, Pete Resnick, mentioned it during Mitten’s presentation.
Jared Miller, Alderman for Ward 7, immediately raised the issue:
“When we were talking about this over the weekend, it hadn’t even crossed my mind that the HRC had proposed the alternative option or resolution, or we would have be having a completely different conversation. I think it would be highly unethical for City staff to decide how the City gets to be held accountable by the HR Ordinance. You’re providing us your recommendation which of the two options that the HRC sent forward, but their intention was not that the City staff would go ahead and cut one of them off and present one to the City. They wanted the City Council to decide which one we wanted, because we’re the voices of the people who we represent in our wards, not the City. The people who we represent need to be able to know what the other option was, and it needs to come up for discussion.”
After some discussion, the Committee of the Whole voted unanimously to keep the issue in Committee, which means it will not move forward, but may be discussed again at a future meeting.
The Urbana City Council discussion of this issue at the January 19th meeting can be viewed here (video is set to start where Miller raises his objection):
“Sorry, that’s the way it goes” Huh?
From a previous meeting whereby Mr. Miller was interrupted by the clerk, the chair here would do well to kindly check her attitude as related to seniority at the meeting room door next time.
‘Sorry it went that way’?