There is no typical day of serving on the Dunwoody City Council but since I still have about an hour to go in uploading the audio from today's three meetings; let me tell you about my day.
8 a.m. Awake, quick breakfast, shower, my wife drives the older boys to a local one week summer camp and I hang out with Declan, my 3 yr old until Mommy is able to get back home.
9:20 a.m. Declan sees Daddy in a suit and becomes mad because he knows Daddy can't hang out and play all day. If it was a Daddy play day, shorts would have been involved and there are no shorts in sight. Unfortunately Daddy left anyway to do things that had to be done.
9:40 a.m. Met with a mortgage broker at a local Dunwoody bank. Blackberry from work never stops, I read most things and respond when needed.
10:30 a.m. City Hall meeting with IT regarding services and then reviewing documents for this evening.
11:30 a.m. First "Official" Meeting of the Day - Public Hearing on Millage Rate.
12:30 p.m. Working Lunch with City Attorney and two other members of the City Council.
12:45 p.m. Fourth member of City Council joins us for lunch which makes a quorum therefore all conversations of city business stops and we talk about cars, sports & kids. (Better conversations anyway.)
1:30 p.m. Joined the City Attorney for a phone call to a resident.
1:40 p.m. Talked to the City Code Enforcement Officer about items of interest.
2:00 p.m. Walked through the entire Police Department build out and personally congratulated a Detective for breaking up a $50,000 dollar shoplifting sting at Perimeter Mall.
2:30 p.m. Meeting with the Police Chief and City Management for an incident briefing and to discuss Police policies & procedures.
4:00 p.m. Blackberry time for the real job, few phone calls. (It never stops.)
4:30 p.m. Popped my head in the Community Development Director's Office to discuss an item on the agenda. Thirty minutes later, I am fully briefed, understand the issues but still unsure if a proposed possible ordinance will have unintended consequences?
5:00 p.m. Drove over to Mudcatz Bar & Grill to meet with the Dunwoody Chamber of Commerce get their thoughts on the Dunwoody Convention & Visitors & Bureau. Decided to go to this instead of seeing my family since I rarely find time to meet with the Chamber when I am hurrying home from work.
5:15 p.m. Find resident who may have the unintended consequences from the 4:30 meeting and bend her ear looking for options.
5:45 p.m. I see Shari O’Halloran, Owner of Mudcatz who gives me a tour of the new music facility they are creating next door. Really impressive - can't wait to see the acts rolling through.
6:00 p.m. Talking to Sheri's husband Mike who discusses the building inspector process, gives both praise and well as suggestions for improvements. Kudos to the Dunwoody inspector Phil who came out today, your service was really appreciated by these good people.
6:15 p.m. I wanted to go back and talk to a few other members of the Dunwoody Chamber but was forced to race (drive carefully in bumper to bumper traffic) over to City Hall for the next meeting.
6:16 p.m. Call home to talk to my bride and Declan gets on the phone and says "I love you Daddy", so I guess he has forgiven me for not making it a play day.
6:30 p.m. Second meeting of the day - Public Hearing and Vote on Millage Rate.
7:00 p.m. City Council Work Session with over 16 items on the agenda. I was prepped on the issues and read everything involved in order to be prepared. Like everyone else, I want to make my points where needed, affect change by interjecting both statements and questions that I feel are relevant. I decided on the fly to question the budget report to position a point on a subject that may be yet hours away on the agenda. (Games, strategy or just kabuki theater without memorized lines? You decide.)
I try to be effective without saying so much that my voice gets lost in the background noise of the meeting. Three and a half hours later, you come out believing it was a good meeting, you think you affected some positive change somewhere but to be honest in work sessions you're never sure what got accomplished since no votes were taken.
10:40 p.m. Executive Session of the Council to discuss pending legal actions & lawsuits.
11:15 p.m. Wendy's drive thru window, tried to eat healthy?
11:30 p.m. Download 3.5 hours of wav files from a device, converted the 14 files to the smaller mp3 file format and start the process of uploading to the server.
11:40 p.m. Type overview of the meeting in order to post links of the meeting audio, once the files are completely uploaded in an hour or two.
12:00 a.m. Figured that I had at least an another hour to upload all the audio files therefore decided to give an update of my "Vacation Day" spent representing you.
It's now well after midnight, I have saved the final version of these blog posts and manipulated the post times to only be a minute after midnight so that I don't look like a freak working on a computer at 2 a.m.
As long as the day was, I enjoyed every minute of it but I am now looking forward to tomorrow (today) so I can put on those shorts so Declan and I can have some quality time at the swim meet where his brothers are competing.
So what do you do on your days off?
2 comments:
I hope you know how much your work is appreciated, especially the blog. It's one of the first things I read in the morning to find out what is happening in our new city. THANK YOU!
Good Morning John,
Better you than me, brother. Detach yourself from the post and read it as one of us. Perhaps it will help you understand why I always make a point of thanking you for all the effort you make on behalf of others each time we meet. Enjoy your shorts today!
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