Out of Order

Cantu had numbers; the city had different numbers. The assistant shelter director told the dais that in all of 2025 the city euthanized twenty animals for space — 2.8 percent of what came through the door — and that a veterinarian signed each one. Either the records are honest and a councilman is accusing his own staff falsely, or the staff are recording space-killings as medical and the 2.8 percent is the lie. Nobody in the room could say which, because the two sides never agreed on what was being counted. City Manager Peter Zanoni, seven years in the job, pointed to the ballot box: “We can put it on the ballot if you want to increase your property tax rate.” Corpus Christi has a hundred kennels. San Jose has six hundred. Cantu’s measure to end the practice had three of nine council signatures — short of a majority.

A furious meeting is not a broken one. Lynchburg proved it on May 13, when the first reading of the city budget turned hot enough that Mayor Larry Taylor stopped it cold after forty-five minutes — “I’m tired of this unnecessary argument” — as Councilman Marty Misjuns and Council Member Sterling Wilder went at each other, Wilder telling the room that residents were “embarrassed … with this city council.” Then the council did its job. It voted, unanimously, to strike a proposed ten-dollar trash fee and a new vehicle fee from the budget. The shouting and the decision lived in the same hour. That is the line the next rooms cross.

In Paterson, the argument was the procedure itself. On April 14, Council President Lilisa Mimms refused a member’s point of order — “point of order is not your opinion, it is out of order” — while Councilman Michael Jackson insisted his vote had been skipped: “No person here can allow for my vote to be skipped over. I am duly elected like everyone else.” Three weeks later a regular meeting was called off; six members turned up that night at a fundraiser where the governor endorsed the mayor’s slate. “Now we know why they weren’t available for the meeting,” said Jackson, who is running for mayor. Mimms called the suggestion inaccurate. By then the dispute was no longer about any item on the agenda. It was about the rules.

A small township does the same thing. In Rockaway, Council President Howard Morrison spent a March 14 meeting ruling Councilman Tucker Kelley out of order, over and over — “Mr. Kelley, you are extremely out of order. Stop talking.” It degenerated from there. “Are we on the playground?” someone asked. “You threw the ball first, Mr. Morrison,” came the reply. No local outlet covered the night; the officials’ names come from the township’s published roster, and the exchange from its own meeting video.

Bloomfield’s council has spent more than a year feuding. Councilor Shamar Mahon has said the town attorney, Andrew Crumbie, treated him unfairly; the council reappointed Crumbie anyway. On April 27, Crumbie tried to give a presentation and could not get through it over the cross-talk, until someone on the dais said it plainly: “You have councilor Mahon who is out of order … this whole thing right now is out of order.” The council was not arguing about what to decide. It was arguing about whether it could start.

It does not take a crisis or a crowd. Melbourne Beach has about three thousand residents, and on March 4 its commission had the same fight in miniature, one official rounding on two others mid-meeting: “Why are you mumbling under your breath? You two mumble all the time.” There were real stakes that night — Mayor Alison Dennington recused herself from a vote to settle a lawsuit against the town, as TAPinto reported. The muttering is what filled the air.

What these rooms are losing is not civility. It is the meeting’s oldest and least glamorous talent: the ability to hold a real disagreement and still come out the other side with a decision. Lynchburg managed it and hated every minute. Paterson and Rockaway turned the rules into the argument. Bloomfield could not get the lawyer through a slide. The distance from the first to the last is short, and 705 councils stood somewhere along it this year.

The 1876 engineer built his rules so that a room full of people who could not stand each other could still pass a motion and go home. The motion was the point — the going-home with something done. A council that only fights has kept the meeting and lost the part that made it worth holding. Every one of these sessions was public, recorded, and now searchable to the second; Hamlet keeps the same record for some 25,000 American governments at myhamlet.com. It is how we found these six, and the 699 we did not have room to show.