Regarding the Sunday editorial, “Everett City Council meetings: Make them worth attending”:
Thank you for illuminating both the egregiousness of the Everett City Council’s vote to reduce night meetings to once a month without public comment and the frustrating committee-meeting process that dominates our City Council’s approach to governing. I have experience with both.
I was involved in the Providence hospital expansion debate and fought for traffic revisions. Since I work for a living, had council meetings been in the morning I would not have been able to present to them dangerous traffic and safety conditions. I believe certain concessions and changes that benefit residents would not have been enacted. There might not be revised truck routes, narrowed streets, improved pedestrian crossings and a boulevard of trees. And I certainly wouldn’t have had the CEO of Providence Everett and the city engineer sitting in my living room discussing how we can better work together. Real change occurred because I went to the council meetings in the evening.
Regarding the committee-meeting approach, not until I got a councilperson on the phone and heard the truth did I understand how decisions are really made in our city. It took four years of living here and fighting an important issue to learn this sad fact. How disrespectful of our citizen’s time and energy.
The public should be allowed to comment on the night-meeting decision. And people, if you care about making Everett a better place, you better be determined and prepared for a healthy dose of frustration.
Britt Stromberg
Everett
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