City Council proposals headed for the trash as session ends
City Council’s list of hundreds of orders proposed during the current two-year session will end up relegated to the City Hall records as the session comes to a close on Wednesday, with many once-ballyhooed proposals quietly sliding to oblivion.
The City Council “green sheets” — the ream of papers that includes all of the matters remaining before its various committees — contains all 202 of the proposals that councilors and Mayor Martin J. Walsh have filed that never were formally resolved. The final city council meeting is Wednesday, after which the bills be refiled if their sponsors wish for another shot.
One once-high-profile bill that’s now doomed is City Councilor Tim McCarthy’s ordinance to ban masks in public places. That came in response to the chaos at the Straight Pride Parade in August, when some masked protesters attacked paraders and cops. McCarthy, who didn’t run for re-election this year, noted the hearing the council did have this fall on the ordinance — and conceded victory to Father Time.
“I am hoping that the mask hearing will elevate this important issue to the State House, where it can be addressed properly,” McCarthy told the Herald. “We ran out of time this year to finish, but I am confident that the city of Boston and the Commonwealth of Massachusetts will always keep in mind the protection of our first responders and citizens.”
Some of the proposals clearly stemmed from incidents that caught headlines. City Councilor Annissa Essaibi-George this past spring introduced a call for hearings into patron safety at bars and clubs after two horrific kidnappings of young women at the start of the year. She defended the move to hold hearings — which ultimately didn’t happen — as much more than just a chance to seize on an issue that made headlines.
“Just because there’s no formal hearing order doesn’t mean there isn’t work happening,” she told the Herald, noting that in the meantime the police department held public meetings on the same topic. “The hearing orders sometimes are used just as tools to promote change.”
City Council President Andrea Campbell said she wishes more progress would have been made on matters such as oversight of police body cameras and civilian oversight of the department.
“In these instances it has been us waiting on the administration for these hearing orders,” Campbell said.
City Councilor Lydia Edwards said her pushes to reform the controversy-plagued Zoning Board of Appeals and overhaul the parking system will be refiled so she can keep working on them next year.
“Sometimes good ideas require the time and the effort,” Edwards said. “The fastest way to move policy along is a dictatorship — Democracy takes time.”
from Boston Herald https://ift.tt/2OVY4cs
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