Our Daily Ordinance
In Which Our Heroine (Christina Turner) Attends a Local Council Meeting
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Creaky church pews held nine audience members, including myself and my civic-minded, history loving neighbor Tristan whom I roped into coming with me. I love these old buildings, memorials to an antiquated idea of stability, relics from before the 20th-century gave our aesthetic souls a real beating, convincing us that stone, metal, and woodwork was a waste of taxpayer money, that we’d be better served by utilitarian cement grids, screens, and large floor-to-ceiling windows in places the public is not allowed to linger.
A laminated printout on the wall stated the room's capacity as 66 people. That seemed recklessly inadequate for a city of 200,000 people. I imagine that did not include the oval of swivel chairs and microphones for the Ward reps, or the stadium seating around the edge of the chamber for the Mayor and other assorted city personnel I didn't recognize. But again, tonight there were only nine of us silent citizens in the room. Everyone had a bench to themselves.
Before this meeting, I knew only of city council what had been considered headline worthy by the Beacon Journal or the West Side Leader. A few years back the Council started live streaming their meetings. Last year they approved what was widely assumed to be, and then did in fact turn out to be, an Amazon Fulfillment Center on the property that used to be Rolling Acres Mall, without knowing for certain what party was interested in obtaining the property. But the biggest splash the Akron City Council has made in recent memory was in 2017 when they voted along race lines to keep Columbus Day, in a heated meeting in which two female representatives of color attempted to speak and were told to “shut up” by a white male council member. Akron's Italian population had reportedly shown up in force to oppose the move: "The room was over capacity" the BJ stated dramatically. So as I sat in the back of that 3rd floor space, I imagined 70 angry Italian Akronites exercising their right to assemble.
Most of the agenda items at the meeting I attended pertained to land use, and the bending of rules that surround it. The only speakers before the public comment section were there to plead for the right to build an electronic billboard.
The business owner in question was afraid that 2 years of bridge construction in front of his establishment would drive him out of business, and his solution was to erect a giant digital display in the sky above his property. He had a team of two lawyers. The primary spoke first, was exhaustingly thorough, and the way he discussed the visual implications of blocked trees and the overall aesthetics of the neighborhood as it pertains to the law was comical. I’ll admit I never thought about zoning laws as essentially aesthetic laws. I could imagine the delightful absurdity of an art critique with a room full of lawyers. There was an uncanny Carrollian sentiment to his premise, "You have my personal assurance that this particular sign, as far as signs go, would be relatively attractive, and in fact, I don't believe I am speaking out of turn when I say it will be the most aesthetically pleasing part of this neighborhood, until, of course, the bridge is completed. The bridge will be prettier. But I don't believe, I mean, the sign, after the bridge is completed, the sign will look of a piece to the bridge."
The second lawyer was younger, and had a younger cadence. He summed things up nicely; however, their points hardly needed a summary. Then a realtor from down the street spoke enthusiastically and at length, as a sort of character witness for the business owner. The realtor had lived in Austin, TX and then Cuyahoga Falls, and now saw Akron as the Land of Opportunity, but was this fine council aware that there was a billboard monopoly that needed broken up? It was positively un-American that only two companies owned all the billboards in town, and there plain ought to be more billboards in a commerce-savvy town like Akron besides.
If you know anyone from Austin or the Falls you know this man already, and if you know anyone from Akron, you know how much we love to hear that we're the next anything, particularly something low-key cool like Austin fucking Texas. And so he went on a while, said some glowing things about the surprising friendship he has built over the past few months with this visionary business owner who wants to uphold the central tenants of capitalism and build a screen in the sky. For business. Finally, the council cut him off by thanking him, and voted to approve the measure.
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More ordinances were then passed in small groups, including some provisions for "wrap around services" for the LeBron school (so Akron!), including apartments and shops for students’ families. And then the meeting was opened for public comment. Three people spoke, one was a gentleman worried in equal measure about both sides of gentrification: would his neighborhood never see the benefit of some fresh development? Would it be developed out from under him? Then there was a landlord who had tired of paying her tenants' water bills if they wouldn't (or couldn't) pay them, and she was convinced the city could fix her problem by shutting her tenants’ water off immediately upon a missed payment. And in fact, it would be much more convenient for her if the city just dealt directly with her tenants for her, why did she have to be mixed up in all this nonsense anyway? She spoke loudly into the microphone, so close that every last "p" popped off the screen and reverberated around the room.
The crux of what frustrated me about the meeting is what frustrates me about all meetings: how all the little work-arounds and shortcuts seemed to have become codified through practice into the standard way the whole thing operates. How often professionalism is just a level of tolerance for dysfunction, or at least, less than optimal function. At the end of fully 22 of the 24 ordinances on the agenda was the phrase "; and declaring an Emergency." Perhaps two of the 22 "emergencies" could in earnest be considered Emergencies: in both cases, authorizing money for sewer repairs. Everything else was just an agenda item that needed to happen, and the only way for it to happen, apparently, was for it to be declared an Emergency, so that the “typical” rules could be waived.
If a law is working, then there's no case; if it comes before the council, it's a special case where the law might need adjusted. To me it just seems obvious that the rules governing a body formed specifically to bend rules as needed should allow for rule bending to happen by design. As I asked Tristan on the way out, “What would we declare if there was an actual emergency?”
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There were two bright spots for me, where the Meeting fell away, and we were humans in a room, and it was not business as usual.
At the very end of the meeting, Linda Omobien stood up and asked if the council could consider a measure regulating all display signage within the city going forward. Obviously anything already built would be grandfathered in, but shouldn't the council consider a general, overarching scheme for the streets of Akron? This was like a giant gulp of fresh air in the room, a brief shining moment of existing in the present. Someone was thinking about the big picture, not just checking boxes.
She was told to discuss it later, one on one with Jeff Fusco, so that the idea’s feasibility as a checkable box could be assessed.
The other moment was the first public commenter, who broke my heart. She approached the mic like a peasant approaching kings. She showered them with effusive praise, and explained that she knew her comment could not be resolved in this forum, but she didn't know who she should speak to for a solution. With some prodding, she confessed she had had housing troubles for years, but was currently in a decent rental. However, it did not have private parking. Last winter, late one night she heard metal scraping against metal and came out the next morning to find it was indeed her vehicle that had gotten destroyed. Now she worries constantly that her car will be rendered useless in the night. What were residents supposed to do to avoid this situation? How could she be assured that the most valuable property she owns, the one possession that can get her to work so she can continue to own it, would stay in working order when parked on the street? Council President Margo Sommerville's face softened. "You can talk to me directly; I will be in touch with you after the meeting."
When we are governments, when we are systems, we grind like gears and get things done and maybe crunch some people up along the way. This is what I went into the meeting expecting to see, some small scale injustice, some nonsensical complaints. And I did see a fair amount of that. But I was also dazzled by these glimpses, be they small, blink and you’ll miss them, of humanity at work, of citizens being heard and solutions being genuinely weighed.
Christina Turner is an artist, writer, and public library employee. You can see her work and read more observations at happywonderfool.com.
back to march 2020 - hell
back to march 2020 - hell
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the staff of perraneu works within a framework of paying that has been plucked from the near future
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