Abruptly ending last night’s School Board meeting at 10 o’clock — 3 snappy hours after it started — was like calling off a family picnic as the entrées arrived.
The fat moment was just ahead, but it would be denied.
President Scott Zeidman tidily runs Board meetings as if he is double-parked and two cops are cycling toward him.
A hundred and eighty minutes of preliminaries had been covered. Next up was the much-anticipated budget cuts vote.
But to the surprise of the thinning crowd in Council Chambers, the unhistorically magic hour of 10 rolled into room like an unfed biker in a kvetchy mood.
The 10 o’clock hour was as rich with irony as burgundy crushed velvet.
A Matter of Timing
As the unheard chime rang, Mr. Zeidman promptly called off the Meeting of the Year.
The School District’s agreement with the city says that penalty fees will be applied if Board members stay for a nightcap past the witching hour.
“I don’t know how much it would have cost to stay later,” Mr. Zeidman said, “but I certainly am not going to spend any money when I have to cut budgets.
“We moved to Council Chambers to make it more convenient for everybody. The last thing we want to do is start paying an hourly rate so we could be more comfortable.
“It sends the wrong message:
“‘I am going to cut you, but by the way, it’s kind of a cool room. So what is $75 an hour or $50 an hour or a hundred dollars an hour? You know what? I have got all the money in the world.’”
The Other Reason
That may have been the governing reason Mr. Zeidman waved the stop sign, but there was another huge influence.
Around 9:30, “when I looked at my other Board members,” he said, “I realized we were not going to get a vote on cuts.”
For Mr. Zeidman, it was an uncluttered decision. The agreement, he explained, says the School Board must vacate Chambers by 10, regardless of whether the meeting starts in late afternoon or early evening. Ten is the line.
“I don’t remember the details of the agreement,” Mr. Zeidman said. “But even if the fee is a nominal number, I just couldn’t stomach…
“It was not as if we had more work to do. We finished everything we had to do — but the budget cuts.”
Thinking ahead, Mr. Zeidman walked down the dais late in the meeting to determine whether members were eager for a same-night pivotal vote. First, he consulted Karlo Silbiger. “‘Are you ready to vote?’ I asked him. He said something to the effect of ‘I think I need more time.’
“I had already looked at Pat (Siever). My read on her, right or wrong, was that she needed more time.
“I could tell from Steve (Gourley) he wasn’t comfortable with everything at this point.
“That meant, in my opinion, and my job is to gauge how it’s going to work, that we had at least three, if not four or five people, who hadn’t made up their minds yet.”
Mr. Zeidman said his colleagues’ attitude influenced him to call it a night as much as the rental fee.
“If I knew I had a vote coming, maybe I could have stomached spending the extra money, and I would have written a check to the District for that amount.
“But I wasn’t going to incur the additional expense only to have people say ‘I need more information.’”
Anticipating the central question of the day, Mr. Zeidman said: “Any cuts we make can be rescinded.
“I can’t predict the future. But there is a reasonable chance that next week we will institute a number of cuts. I can’t tell because we haven’t voted yet. If and when we reach some sort of labor accord with some sort of concessions to give that money back, it will not go into our pockets but it will be used to rescind as many cuts as we can.”
