WFMY's Mickens gets an F in math

GREENSBORO, NC -- Sam Hieb at Piedmont Publius posted a segment from WFMY's Frank Mickens in which Mickens takes the Greensboro City Council to task. Mickens compared the average time for the past five Greensboro City Council meetings to the averages for the Winston-Salem, High Point and Burlington city councils. He concludes:

"Greensboro City Council averages a whopping six hours and eleven minutes."

Mickens has made three mistakes.

Math error
The average time of the past five Greensboro city council meetings is 5 hours and 43 minutes, not the "whopping" 6 hours and 11 minutes Mickens reports.

Small sample
I'm not sure why Mickens chose only the last five meetings to average, but that's a small sample for a body that has more than twenty meetings a year. Average the length of the all of Greensboro City Council's meetings this year to date, and it is 4 hours and 48 minutes.

Selective Comparison
I question the value of this kind of comparison over a short period. Nonetheless, it is certainly less informative to compare Greensboro only to smaller cities. A better comparison would include the next larger North Carolina city. That would be Raleigh; and here is a comparison of the average meeting lengths this year.

Greensboro: 4 hours, 48 minutes

Raleigh: 5 hours, 5 minutes

It is good to see local television spend a little time on local government. This story, however, created the wrong impression: that the problem with Greensboro City Council is simply that the meetings are too long. We should be very careful about cultivating that impression because the likely response will be less public discussion and debate, less time for speakers from the floor and more of the council's business done behind the scenes.