Well, duh!

GREENSBORO, NC -- At last night's city council meeting, during the public comment portion of the meeting, council took a little side trip prompted by a misunderstanding of their own rules. The rules currently state that each speaker from the floor will have up to 3 minutes to speak and that the total of all speakers will be 30 minutes. That's 30 minutes for the speakers from the floor -- not for speakers from the dais.

For Mayor Robbie Perkins, though, if one speaker speaks for 3 minutes and the council talks about the speaker's topic for 27 minutes, he counts that as having reached the 30 minutes total for speakers from the floor even though there has been only 3 minutes of speaking from the floor. That's not what the rules say.

Nonetheless, in discussing whether or not to continue beyond the 30 minutes for speakers—that they had not yet reached—the mayor complained last night that many of the same people keep coming back meeting after meeting to talk about the same issues.

Well, duh! That's because this council is really bad at fixing things. They sit on their hands or accept nonsensical dissembling answers from the city's top staff and fail to actually change anything.

The mayor should worry less about blaming passionate people for their tenacity and more about addressing the reasons they keep coming back: because we have a do-nothing council.

Duh!