Prior to its withdrawal, the Kenai Peninsula Borough Assembly considered an ordinance that would amend borough code to limit assembly member’s closing comments to three minutes. Ordinance 2021-24 was introduced by Assemblymen Richard Derkevorkian and Kenn Carpenter. If approved, the ordinance would have limited the assembly’s closing comment period to three minutes per assembly member in alignment with the public’s comment time limitations.
A proposed amendment by Carpenter would have amended the time limit to five minutes. Assemblyman Derkevorkian said:
“As you know, I brought this ordinance forward. Five minutes is a long time. If you can’t give a committee report in five minutes, I feel like we should work on that. I’ve been attending these meetings since October. I’ve maybe heard one or two committee reports at the end of the meeting. So it’s not what we’ve been utilizing our closing comments for, for the last eight months. The reason I brought this forward is because it’s in the best interest of the public’s time. If we want to give a committee report, it should be to the point. If you need to have notes in front of you to wrap it up in five minutes, maybe that’s a good idea, but I brought this forward, that’s why it’s here to vote on.”
Assemblyman Tyson Cox motioned for an amendment that would include other committee, commission, and council reports under the Mayor’s Report:
“If someone has a suggestion to move that, I’m all for it, I just would like to see it as a specific spot if we’re going to limit the ending comments of assembly members because a lot of times those ending comments aren’t necessarily for a committee that you’re on. It might be something that you’re wanting to get a feel for from the rest of the assembly on something you may be wanting to bring forward later, those kinds of things. This is the time when we get to speak to each other. We can’t talk to all each other outside of these meetings. We have to do it here. So that’s one time that we can do that. For an extra report, I think that should be open for people to do it. Not everybody does, not all the time. It would not be something that would be lengthy in my opinion, but it something, I think, that would be useful.”
Derkevorkian said that Cox’s amendment would make meetings longer and that his intent for bringing the ordinance forward was to shorten them, stating how many members of the audience are left by the time the meeting ends. A suggestion was brought forth to the assembly by to withdraw Ordinance 2021-24, which received unanimous support.