Review parliamentary practices

In the article on how the Calais School Committee’s vote on filling a vacancy is being questioned (BDN, Nov. 9), some attention is being given to just what makes a quorum – how many members must be present and vote, to pass a measure. The article writer did some research and the claim is made that you could get a “mixed” reaction if you asked lawyers about this.

However, I see another flaw in how meetings are conducted in Calais. A couple of questions I have are: Why is the chair seconding a motion and voting on the measure at all? Why, consistently, do committee chairs and mayors here take part in discussions on motions?

While I think Dale Earle will make a valuable member of the Calais School Committee, the way he was appointed violates some fundamental principles of parliamentary procedure. With the chair and two members present at the recent school committee hearing, and one member making a motion to appoint the candidate and the other declining to second, the motion should have died for lack of a seconder.

Yet, here comes the chair, seconding the motion, and then voting with another member to pass the measure (not break a tie, which is the accepted role of the chair in meetings). I don’t think Earle was accorded the respect he and the other candidates deserve, either. That respect requires that candidates for appointment have a full quorum. If people are out sick or on vacation, the business should wait.

The way in which that appointment was made stands in contrast to the behavior of the school committee member who earlier had resigned, thus creating the vacancy. When Tracy DeWitt said she was resigning to avoid a possible conflict of interest – her husband was an applicant for a job in the schools here – I think she did the honorable thing. It was a recognition that there are guiding parliamentary principles to be observed.

It may be true – and it has been said here – that local legislative bodies may make whatever rules they want about how they conduct their business. They are not bound to the finer points of parliamentary practices. And there is resistance to the idea that the mayor – now elected citywide in Calais – should refrain from seconding a motion to get it on the table, from discussing the measure once it’s on the table, and from voting (except to break a tie). Still, in my view, the way meetings are conducted here offends a sense of justice, a sense that things are to be done correctly.

Last year, the Calais School Committee acted in a manner similar to the way they acted in the recent meeting. Following that, I found a city councilor here shared my feeling of frustration that a chair was unaware of the role of a chair. This city councilor was equally concerned about how the then-mayor of Calais, in open council meetings, routinely spoke on issues and voted on measures. This councilor got the go-ahead to seek advice on possible reforms of policy on how the council should conduct its business.

Calling on my almost 30 years experience as a reporter and trainer of reporters, and my two years as president of a parliamentary press gallery, I submitted to this councilor a green paper on accepted parliamentary procedures and possible reforms. I used as references the policies the Calais City Council goes by now, adopted in July 1983, Robert’s Rules, Bourinot, and some other sources of accepted procedure.

In this 14-page paper, I wrote “almost all the mischief – real or perceived – has come about because Councilors lack knowledge and provisions of the current Rules and Orders of the Calais City Council, and because they do not have an understanding of parliamentary practice.” Bluntly, chairs and mayors here don’t seem to have a clue about their responsibility to see that business is carried on correctly.

The paper wasn’t all a thumbs-down affair, though. A couple of ideas presented themselves.

If the chair wishes to discuss the issue or vote, she or he can hand the gavel to another, temporarily. Rules 4 and 9 of the existing rules of Calais City Council seem to allow this. So do Robert’s Rules and Bourinot.

Here, in part, is what Robert writes in his Rules: “The Chairman sometimes calls a member to the Chair, and himself takes part in the debate; but this should rarely be done, and nothing can justify it in a case where much feeling is shown, and there is a liability to difficulty in preserving order. If the chairman has even the appearance of being partisan, he has lost much of his ability to control those who are on opposite sides of the question.” And: “The unfortunate habit many chairmen have of constantly speaking on questions before the assembly … is unjustified by either common parliamentary law or the practice of Congress.”

Another idea which might work in Calais would be the system we employ in our town meetings around here. We could have a nonpartisan, nonvoting moderator. Robert’s Rules and Bourinot suggest this.

Whatever way Calais chooses to go, policy-makers here might do well to make themselves familiar with accepted parliamentary practices. Those practices aren’t just “niceties” people “from away” use; they are practices worked out in the forge of experience, as policy-makers over the centuries – many of them among our own founding fathers and their successors – tried to keep legislating in line with justice and correctness.

Ron Cuddy is a writer living in Calais.