A.G. Gancarski
On Tuesday, the Jacksonville City Council’s Neighborhoods, Community Investment, and Services committee had a light agenda.
Just one bill came up — a proposed transfer of $422,441 from the “Pinnacle-Fidelity Global Project” to public investment policy funds for economically distressed areas.
The committee voted in favor of that, 3 to 1, with Chairman Scott Wilson the no vote. But the bill needed four votes to pass, so it stayed in committee.
NCIS, until last week, had seven members; after the departure of member Matt Schellenberg late last week, however, it was down to six.
And during that vote, with Councilman Bill Gulliford an excused absence and Councilman Doyle Carter late for the meeting, the committee was down to four members.
Throughout the committee meeting, which included a discussion of that bill and of future special committee discussions to come (including a discussion of how best to deploy convict labor to address Jacksonville’s blight issues and such, which included Councilman Carter noting there’s “plenty of work to do” and “plenty of inmates”), Schellenberg’s name and the reasons for his leaving the committee were not mentioned.
Not once.
After the meeting, we asked Chairman Wilson why Schellenberg didn’t come up.
Wilson was not sure.
And, despite the 3-to-1 vote, Wilson vowed to “keep things going,” saying the committee “won’t miss a beat.”
And that could be the case.
What was clear in the agenda meeting — with a bright-and-early 8:30 start — was that the committee couldn’t miss a beat there.
Wilson was the only committee member in attendance.
Agenda meetings historically started at 9 a.m. for morning committees, with the general business also pushed back half an hour, until 9:30.
So maybe the light attendance was just a matter of a light agenda and an early start after a three-day weekend with a Florida State football game running into the midnight hour.
Then again, maybe there is a larger problem, with committee scheduling being too robust for those with full-time jobs outside of the council.
Council President Lori Boyer and VP John Crescimbeni both treat council work as a full-time gig, even though members of the body are paid as and treated as part-time workers.
Some members of the body absorb the extra work as the price to be paid for policy influence.
Some others — at least Schellenberg, and possibly others — see the increased scheduling burden as a threat to their personal bottom lines.
Perhaps NCIS won’t “miss a beat” in the absence of Schellenberg.
The answer to that depends ultimately on whether or not he’s an outlier: a second-term council member who may believe the current structure of committees, designed to help first-term members of the body get meaningful experience before their second terms, is too laden with busywork to effectively conduct the business at hand.
