Our View: No debate and no leadership

Last week, when the Green River City Council was supposed to discuss and deliberate on an increase to residents’ solid waste rates, anyone interested in listening to what individual Council representatives thought about the proposed increase was met with only one response.

Total silence.

According to Robert’s Rules of Order, when a piece of business to be introduced to a governing body fails to receive a motion to do so, it dies for a lack of motion and the governing body moves on to its next piece of business.

However, allowing this to happen communicates a number of messages to Green River’s residents, some of which might not be intentional.

We think this indicates the Council not only doesn’t know what it wants to do, but collectively is too afraid of what discussion on the rate increase would telegraph to residents as far as their thoughts on privatizing solid waste collection are.

There were other options for the Council, should it not be ready to act on a rate increase. For example, a city Council representative could have motioned to table the issue.

The motion to table, if passed, would have placed the rate increase on the next Council agenda and would have given the message that there are a few things they want to work out before approving a rate increase.

The Council could have also approved a change to its agenda at the start of the meeting, removing the rate increase from the agenda. This would also communicate the Council isn’t ready to act on it.

However, carrying on as the Council did last week was the worst possible way of dealing with this issue.

Failure to pursue any sort of action, even if only to table it, erodes any sense of leadership the Council wants to provide residents of the city.

Being a city council representative is a lot more than attending ribbon cuttings or talking to constituents and representing their views with the Council.

It also means making the kind of difficult decisions that will impact city employees and residents and won’t be 100 percent popular. By failing to act, the Council communicates it doesn’t want to make those kinds of decisions.

The Council has time to act, but time is running out.

It will have to adopt a budget by the end of the month and any responsible budget will have to address the rate increase.

The Council needs to provide decisive leadership.