You’ll need your mornings free to participate in these Fort Worth City Council meetings
Next year, some of the Fort Worth City Council meetings will be held in the morning.
It’s a move some council members say will increase access to the city’s government and clear up evenings for other events, but many who spoke Tuesday night saw it as a means to stifle public comment.
Lizzie Maldonado said the schedule change appeared to be a way to silence community input and opinions council members weren’t interested in hearing. Morning meetings are unfairly advantageous to developers and others doing business with the city and are impossible for working residents to attend, she said.
“I’m starting to think it doesn’t matter to you at all that we’re here,” she said. “Has our input ever changed your minds or do you show up ready to vote?”
Maldonado is one of more than a dozen who have regularly attended council meetings since the Oct. 12 shooting of Atatiana Jefferson by a Fort Worth police officer in her home. Between a little more than a dozen and nearly 70 people have urged the city to move rapidly on police oversight and decried what they see has systemic racism. Some have complained that council members often seem uninterested in what they have to say.
The council unanimously approved holding the third meeting of some months, if not canceled, in the morning. Council work sessions will begin at 8:30 a.m. followed by 10 a.m. council meetings on the following dates next year:
▪ March 24
▪ April 21
▪ May 19
▪ June 16
▪ Aug. 18
▪ Sept. 22
▪ Dec. 15
Councilwoman Gyna Bivens has asked for morning meetings at least once a month for about three years, she said. She believes morning meetings will increase chances for school field trips to watch the council and may encourage elderly residents to attend if they don’t want to drive at night.
The change, she said, was unrelated to the recent increase in speakers and unrest about police and community relations.
“This has never been about the state our city is in,” she said.
Until 2015, the council held two evening meetings and two morning meetings a month. In 2017, the council required speakers to sign up before 5 p.m. and reduced the time for anyone representing a group from 10 minutes to six minutes.
Tara Wilson said she had signed up to speak several times before, but rarely had been able to make the evening meetings. On Tuesday she missed her daughter’s high school basketball game to speak, she said. Morning meetings would only increase that burden.
“As a taxpaying citizen, I should have the right to get into this building to speak to the members that represent me,” she said.
