3rd time’s the charm for new planners

Items at Tuesday’s Planning Commission — a permit for a wine bar and a zoning issue — were relatively benign compared with the road traveled to make the meeting happen.

The latest bump occurred two hours before the new commission met, when the City Council once again appointed its choices for the makeup of the planning board.

It was the third time in four months that the council has appointed the same set of members, during a disputed process that involved a lawsuit and accusations of political maneuvering.

This time, the council’s one-hour meeting came in response to a complaint from former commissioners who were not named to the new board. The former commissioners claimed that last week’s appointments were invalid because of a disruption during the Nov. 2 council meeting.

Before the council considered the appointments last week, Mayor Pamela Torliatt halted the meeting after former councilman Bryant Moynihan interrupted the council’s budget deliberations, asking to be heard.

Torliatt used the word “adjourn” in halting the meeting, but after a five-minute break the council reconvened and continued with its agenda, including the planning appointments.

Former planning commissioner Spence F. Burton, one of three former members who launched a lawsuit over the formation of the new board, contends that the break in last week’s meeting was a formal end to the meeting and that the appointments were invalid.

“As such, any actions by the ‘new’ planning commissioners ... would be null and void,” Burton wrote in an e-mail to the city Monday afternoon.

That sparked the scheduling of Tuesday’s special council meeting, which city officials said was held out of “an abundance of caution” to make sure the new commission could meet without any dispute over its makeup.

But City Manager John Brown and City Attorney Eric Danly said the Nov. 2 appointments were lawful. Danly said the mayor did not intend to end the meeting and used the wrong word.

“At the staff level, we don’t believe that it’s necessary,” Brown said of the re-vote on the appointments. “My concern is that the Planning Commission gets off on the right foot, rather than operate under a cloud.”

Burton also expressed concerns that the council and the public had not been given 24 hours’ notice of the special meeting, but Danly said the city’s notification efforts complied with the Brown Act, the state’s open-meeting law.

During Tuesday’s re-vote, council members David Glass and David Rabbitt once again clashed over the formation of the new commission. Rabbitt and other members of the council’s minority have accused the council majority of appointing political allies to the commission.

After Glass made a motion to appoint the commissioners, Rabbitt asked for further discussion. But Glass made a second motion that the vote be taken immediately, then modified his request to limit debate to 10 more minutes.

“How many times are we going to discuss this, Mr. Rabbitt?” Glass said. “This is nothing more, in my opinion, than a filibuster.”

Rabbitt said the notion that he is trying to filibuster and delay the new appointments is “utterly ridiculous and really just compounds the idiocy of this entire episode.”

The appointments of Melissa Abercrombie, Chris Arras, Dennis Elias, Marianne Hurley, Curtis Johansen and Jennifer Pierre, along with the naming of Vice Mayor Teresa Barrett as the council’s liaison to the commission, were approved on a 4-2 vote with Councilmember Mike Healy absent. Rabbitt and Councilmember Mike Harris voted no.

The commission met about an hour later in the same chambers with all the new members present.

(Contact Corey Young at corey.young@arguscourier.com)