BUILDING OUR CITY

Outcry leads to reopening applying for city boards

By JEFF WILKINSON - jwilkinson@thestate.com

More people can now apply for positions on the powerful boards that govern Columbia, City Council members say.

Council closed applications last week but changed its mind after the Greater Columbia Chamber of Commerce and some prominent neighborhood organizations complained.

The groups’ leaders said they were shocked to learn that so many seats on the Planning Commission and Design, Development Review Commission were coming open at once — in the case of the planning commission, all of them.

The wholesale turnover comes as council is struggling with contentious growth control issues, such as regulating “McMansions,” that the boards will decide. And growth has emerged as the leading issue in April’s elections.

The heavy turnover comes because council failed to enforce term limits it passed two years ago and it has made few appointments to replace members whose terms have expired.

The groups claim the council did not have an adequate public vetting of the new rules or adequately publicize the openings.

“It’s an openness in government issue,” said Ike McLeese, the chamber’s president and CEO. “I read the council agendas. I did not know they were accepting applications. It smacks of inside baseball.”

McLeese said recent graduates of Leadership Columbia and the chamber’s board have expressed interest in applying.

Coles Lawton, president of the Wales Garden Neighborhood Association, said that while a few individual association members knew of the openings, the organization was not formally notified by the city and most members were in the dark.

“I was unaware of any aspect of it,” she said. “And if we didn’t know about it, there are many, many other people who didn’t know anything about it.”

State-mandated staggered terms and other issues surrounding the appointments will likely be a topic of discussion at next Wednesday’s meeting.

Six of the seven council members voted to close the application process last week, saying the time had come after two years to appoint members.

Mayor Bob Coble was the only member to dissent.

He said reopening the process “is the right decision. We need to have an open and transparent process.”

The complaints came after a story in The State about the mass changeover alerted the public.

The boards’ membership has huge political consequences and could shape the development of the city for years.

Politically conservative council members Daniel Rickenmann and Kirkman Finlay said last week they are trying to get more developer-friendly members on the boards, which have typically been dominated by neighborhood leaders and architects.

Rickenmann moved to close the application process last week, he said, to speed up the process of appointing members. But he said it was “the will of council” to accept more applications after the outcry from the public.

Council candidate Cameron Runyon is challenging Rickenmann for an at-large seat. The problems surrounding the appointment — the mass turnover, two years of missed appointments, a lack of public scrutiny and no provisions for staggered terms — all stem from a lack of “competency,” he said.

“We should hold ourselves to a higher standard,” he said. “We shouldn’t have this seat-of-our-pants mentality.”

Finlay also acquiesced after the chamber weighed in.

“We need to appoint people who are in tune with the neighborhood community, but also with the business community,” he said.

Council member Anne Sinclair said she voted to close applications because they had an adequate group of qualified applicants to choose from.

“We want people to apply,” she said. “But do it quickly.”