This week’s meeting of Springfield City
Council had the air of a lopsided baseball game. Aldermen threw a
series of breaking curve balls, and the mayor went down swinging on
a 3-0 count.
First, the 4.5 percent rate hike requested by
City Water, Light and Power failed 4-6. That request — the
first of several planned to fund the construction of a new power
plant — is likely to resurface at the council’s
February 15 meeting.
Next, the council refused to approve the
annual budget appropriation, instead taking a voice vote to send
the ordinance back to committee for further amendments. Mayor Tim
Davlin called the move “disrespectful,” chastising
council members for not submitting amendments sooner. Council coordinator Joe Davis
spoke up in defense of the aldermen, saying last-minute amendments are
a council tradition.
Later, Ward 3 Alderman Frank Kunz called the
mayor’s complaint disingenuous. “We’ve been
yelling at each other for over a month about what’s going to
come out of this budget and what wasn’t,” Kunz said.
The mayor, he added, “knew what most of us were going to do,
whether it was written down or not.”
Toward the end of the evening, the council approved a historic ordinance creating for the
first time in Springfield a citizen review board to examine complaints
against police. But that vote, too, marked a defeat for Davlin. Even
though the mayor supports the creation of the panel, he pleaded with
council members to send the ordinance back to committee to allow the
city time to negotiate with the police union.
The Police Benevolent and Protective
Association Unit No. 5 considers creation of a review board to be a
mandatory topic of collective bargaining.
This article appears in Feb 3-9, 2005.
