City councilmembers struggle to balance work and city duties

By Charles Sercombe
Work and school duties have proven to be a problem for city councilmembers Mohammed Hassan and Adam Albarmaki.
Both have missed a number of meetings this year. For Hassan, it’s been work obligations, and for Albarmaki it’s been a double-whammy of balancing work, school and city council duties.
This issue raised a question of what constitutes an excused absence from attending a meeting.
The city council struggled with this issue at a recent meeting, when Councilmembers Hassan and Albarmaki asked for their previous absences to be officially excused.
The question thus raised is, do councilmembers have to tell someone on council before a meeting that they can’t make it, or can an absence be excused later?
The City Charter is actually clear on this issue.
It says, in section 6-11:
“… (I)f any councilperson or mayor shall absent himself from council
meetings for a period of five unexcused consecutive regular meetings or ten unexcused regular meetings within a year without good and sufficient reason, and without the permission of the council, the office held by such person shall be deemed to be vacant.”
Hassan has missed a total of seven meetings this year, but they were not five in a row. Albarmaki has missed three meetings so far.
The council spoke at length on the subject, with Councilmember Amanda Jaczkowski saying “It’s silly to look backwards.”
Instead, she said the council needs to settle the matter going forward. She said one issue to be considered is whether a councilmember has to provide proof that their absence is legitimate.
“We don’t have anything to work with,” Jaczkowski said.
Councilmember Nayeem Choudhury took Hassan and Albarmaki to task.
“We choose to be on council,” he said. “If you want to be a good councilmember, you want to be here.”
In the end, the council agreed with Jaczkowski, and tabled the issue indefinitely to work out a policy.
Published Nov. 4, 2022