The recent move by the Bremerton City Council President to kill the planning committee is the wrong direction for budgetary cost savings he claims to seek with the move and will lead to more behind-the-door 6th floor dealmaking on local zoning and development.

Cutting the planning committee and its open-to-the-public nature has left the city’s leadership, already notorious for financial gaffs, poor planning and cutting the public out, farther from public scrutiny. Now, there is less chance for the public to listen in, participate, consider and respond to proposed plans as well as councilmembers’ thoughts and opinions, before putting a zoning change or planning problem to the full city council for a vote.

The council president’s belief that his cutting the committee is “saving the public” from a need to go to committee meetings, further reveals city leadership as paying little more than lip service to the public process.

The city’s leaders should be applauded for looking at ways to reshape city government to fit within the new reality of declining or stagnant revenue sources. In this case, however, cutting the committee is tantamount to cutting public access to the debate of the planning process and will give more power to the director of Community Development, a non-elected city employee who is unaccountable to the voters. The director is already known for arranging consensus among council members prior to council meetings on planning and zoning issues and votes – out of the public eye – so that her department does not have to rewrite and ordinance later, should a vote of the full council body not go according to staff recommendations.

That the news of the disbanded planning committee comes in the same week that the city also canceled its weekly meeting because there was not enough business at hand to bother council members’ already busy schedules with a meeting is doubly illustrative in a time when the city cannot say what will become of its budget as the year progresses. The Mayor attempted to justify it all by saying that it’s hard for council members to make all the committee meetings and regular council meetings because they have jobs.

Perhaps the busy schedules that keep elected officials from, or leave them too tired to perform, the peoples’ business should be a consideration during the 2014 council elections in which every seat is up for grabs as the city shrinks from nine to seven council seats.