Berkeley’s city manager quietly introduced legislation to hold City Council meetings during the middle of the workday, rather than in the evenings — then spiked the proposal on Tuesday, hours after it began attracting public attention and scrutiny.
City Manager Dee Williams-Ridley has not said why she put forward the proposal to shift the start time of regular City Council meetings from 6 p.m. to 10 a.m., nor why she withdrew the legislation, which the council was scheduled to consider Tuesday night.
Reached by a reporter ahead of the meeting Tuesday, Williams-Ridley referred questions about the proposal to Mayor Jesse Arreguín.
Critics charged that the change would make it more difficult for working people and students to participate in council meetings. Some questioned whether that was the point of Williams-Ridley’s proposal, as the embattled City Council has faced months of disruptive protests from demonstrators, many of them students, who want Berkeley to pass a resolution calling for a cease-fire in Gaza.
As Tuesday’s meeting approached, though, the shift had flown under the radar. That’s likely because the proposed change to meeting start times was not mentioned in summaries of Williams-Ridley’s proposal that were included in the agenda for Tuesday’s meeting and submitted last month to the council’s Agenda Committee, which sets the agenda.
Instead, the summaries focused on a more minor change in Williams-Ridley’s proposal that called for rescheduling a single April council meeting. The summary for the item provided to the Agenda Committee seemed to indicate meetings would continue to start at their usual evening time. It read, “Adopt a Resolution modifying the City Council regular meeting schedule for 2024, with starting times of 6:00 p.m., to reschedule the April 16, 2024 regular meeting to April 2, 2024.”
Neither Williams-Ridley nor a city spokesperson responded to questions from Berkeleyside about the agenda summaries, although a reference to the proposed change to meeting start times was added to the council’s online agenda Tuesday morning.
The first public discussion of the proposal appeared to come late Monday night, when Sam Greenberg, a former legislative assistant in the office of Councilmember Rigel Robinson, who resigned in January, posted about the change on X, the social media site formerly known as Twitter.
Williams-Ridley’s proposal amounted to a “massive change to the way we run our public meetings,” Greenberg said in an interview, but it was being made without justification and presented in public documents as a minor procedural step.
“This being done in such a concealed way will massively erode the public’s trust in city management and in the mayor,” Greenberg said.
Berkeleyside published a story about the proposal late Tuesday morning. Shortly after that, city spokesman Matthai Chakko sent a reporter a brief statement saying the city manager planned to pull the legislation from Tuesday’s agenda.
The council has held its regular meetings at 6 p.m. for years, and used to begin its meetings even later, though it occasionally schedules other meetings for the afternoons or mornings. Williams-Ridley’s proposal called for the new 10 a.m. start time to take effect at the council’s Feb. 27 meeting.
Before Williams-Ridley pulled the proposal, it was not clear whether the council would back the shift to morning meetings.
A spokesperson for Arreguín did not respond to an inquiry Tuesday asking whether the mayor supports the idea.
Councilmember Terry Taplin endorsed the change, saying earlier meetings would make it easier for members to balance other responsibilities.
Councilmember Sophie Hahn said she wanted to know more about the proposal. Hahn, a member of the Agenda and Rules Committee, said the committee did not see Williams-Ridley’s full proposal when it put the item on Tuesday’s council agenda, and only had access to the summary that did not reference changing the start times.
“I need to better understand the reasons for bringing this forward — it’s different from what was indicated on the Agenda Committee agenda,” Hahn said Tuesday morning. “I look forward to hearing from the city manager what her reasons are for asking for this change.”
