Snowballing over from another disagreement about how to represent the events in official minutes, a debate over how to formalize meeting procedures took place among Park Hills elected officials on Tuesday.
“It needs to happen because everyone seems to have forgotten their behavior,” said Mayor Kathy Zembrodt. “Everyone seems to forget that Robert’s Rules is like a standard that all the cities use.”
The proposed ordinance, which underwent a first reading before discussion began, was crafted by Zembrodt in conjunction with City Attorney Dan Braun, who also serves as the city attorney for Newport. Modeled after a resolution from 2011, the ordinance sought to formalize meeting procedures around a simplified version of Robert’s Rules of Order, a set of parliamentary procedures dating back to the late nineteenth century.
Many cities, businesses and organizations have come to adopt Robert’s Rules over time as a means of keeping meetings organized. While it’s difficult for everybody to adhere to the rules perfectly, many cities in Northern Kentucky use Robert’s Rules as a model for running meetings.
Zembrodt’s comments came in the shadow of a special meeting on Sept. 29, in which Council Member Sarah Froelich walked out of the council chambers in protest.
“The point of this ordinance, for the benefit of everybody here–the process is to facilitate respectful, focused public debate so that things can be accomplished,” said Council Member Pam Spoor. “The process is not an end in itself. The process is a means to accomplishing things in a proper manner.”
Froelich had brought her own alternative proposed ordinance, which was less reliant on Robert’s Rules. The discussion was somewhat meandering and by the end, the council had agreed to make some changes to the initial ordinance, namely to remove a call for a consent agenda and to add a line that explicitly states that four or more members of the council count as a quorum, rather than tying up the prerequisite for conducting business in less-definite words like “majority.”
Towards the end of the meeting, after the discussion of the ordinance had concluded, Zembrodt took some time to address the people in the meeting and the community more broadly about both the tenor of the meeting on Sept. 29 and the invective she said she’d been subject to on social media.
“The last meeting was so disgusting,” Zembrodt said. “The sound of everybody just talking, and the rudeness and disrespect I heard from so many residents that day… it was just appalling.”
She characterized some of the social media posts she’d seen as “disinformation” that made “our city look bad, unfriendly, even unwelcoming to a business or business growth.”
“I think it’s just part of being an elected official,” said Council Member Emily Sayers. “It doesn’t make it right.”
“We don’t do it for money,” said Council Member Greg Claypole. “We do it for the love of the city.”
Spoor, earlier in the discussion, said she received an email that she regarded as a “veiled threat.”
Braun commented on the email.
“I do believe this has to do with the quorum issue, or the conduct of meetings,” Braun said, “but the implied accusation against my integrity as your attorney and the direct accusation against Miss Spoor is not going to be tolerated.”
Gretchen Stephenson, the resident who said she had sent the email to Spoor, asked to address the council at the end of the meeting, where she read from the text of her email.
Stephenson read, “I feel it is important to remind you [Spoor] that as a member of the Kentucky Bar, you are expected to uphold higher standards of ethics and honesty than the general public, including your fellow council members. This obligation extends to holding other members of the Kentucky Bar to these higher standards, as well.”
LINK nky viewed a copy of the email after the meeting and confirmed that Stephenson was reading it verbatim.
At the meeting, she said she viewed her actions “as holding you accountable, and holding you accountable for these kind of ordinances that impact how the public can address you and what procedures we’re going to use.”
Stephenson had previously made a complaint to the Kentucky Attorney General’s office challenging the validity of a vote that took place at the special meeting on Sept. 29. You can read about that meeting here.