City Council Meeting

Last night we went to a city council meeting. OK, Kirk went back to work and I took the three children and went to a city council meeting. The council was going to discuss and decide on a change to city code wording that would close loopholes in the definitions of "owner occupant" and some other terms. Probably about 95% of the people here not only would be completely bored by this, but would not have these changes apply to them. However, these terms have a huge impact in our neighborhood (if you were wondering how or why, you could see the discussion on our neighborhood webpage/blog) and the neighborhood chair wanted people who supported the proposal to attend. I wrote a letter to the city council and then stayed through all the agenda items (including a long discussion about two maple trees on 800 N.) until they finally got to the one we wanted to hear at 9 p.m. By that time, the boys were running up and down the rows of seats and hitting them to see them bounce back and forth. So the neighborhood chair took them out to get a drink while I got up and made my comment. The boys watched me talk on the television out in the lobby. They were very impressed with the local cable channel. We left before the meeting was over, but were happy to find out that the issue was approved. Cheers for protecting neighborhoods and doing our civic duty! We also think it is interesting (and nice) that we live in a small enough place that we can directly participate in local government.