BH Commission Updates Rules

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Come next year, Benton Harbor City Commissioners will be doing things a little bit differently. At their final regular meeting of 2018 on Monday, they voted to amend the council rules to allow members to suspend the rules at the will of the majority and to add resolutions from the floor. They also voted to change the position of committee vice chair to co-chair. Commissioner Mary Alice Adams said the rules they’d been operating under prevented the commission from taking quick action.

“There’s some things going on that actually require us to bring things to the floor,” Adams said.

The commission rules used to allow for resolutions to be submitted from the floor at meetings, but that was changed under former Mayor James Hightower on a commission vote. Mayor Pro Tem Duane Seats said the old way allowed for unvetted surprises.

“These are the council rules that they approved,” Seats said. “The EFM didn’t give us these. We said, “Stop bringing stuff from the floor’ because we would get here and people had ten resolutions without any documentation, nobody knew anything about them, and they wanted you to vote on them.”

Mayor Marcus Muhammad agreed, asking for transparency and calling the move to the old rules an “a step backwards.”

“If you bring a resolution that’s already written from the floor, then who wrote it, who vetted it, did the public see it, or is this just something that you did in a dark room?”

The majority disagreed with Seats and Muhammad, with Commissioner Ron Singleton saying strict procedures sometimes handicap the body. Commissioner Sharon Henderson voted with the mayor and mayor pro-tem, while the rest of the votes were in favor of the changes. Commissioner CF Jones was not present.