If you go to a Sonora City Council meeting or watch one on TV, you might notice that three Council members face the public behind a long table, and the other two Council members do not. It didn't always look this way. When I joined the Council in 1995, five Council members sat behind that long table and looked directly at the audience. The five of us were shoulder to shoulder. At first, I was unnerved by the arrangement. I thought we looked like actors in a play, or maybe judges in court. More to the point, five people sitting next to each other at a table is not too comfortable, especially when your job is to debate, decide, and vote. To debate, decide, and vote while confined in a five person lineup, you have to stretch your neck and twist your head if you want to make any eye contact with your colleagues. How can you conduct serious business under those conditions?
I came up with what I considered to be a better seating plan and convinced Greg Applegate, the Chief Administrative Officer, to try it out. The way to set things up, I told him, was to have only three Council members sitting in back of the long table. Put the other two at each end of the table facing each other so that they could see their three colleagues behind the table, and also turn the other way when necessary to see the audience. After one meeting using the new arrangement, it was a done deal. The Council members liked it. That's the way we carried on with our business from then on, and it was a whole lot better than the five of us staring straight ahead, never looking at each other as we worked through the issues before us.
Instituting the new seating plan meant a lot to me. It allowed me the space I needed to make eye contact with people I was meeting with, and as a consequence, I could do a better job of representing my constituents at our Council meetings. It was a good legacy to leave with the Sonora City Council members because of the benefit it afforded them as they conducted their deliberations. Making the world a better place to live is a core value in my life. I learned it very young and it has never let me down.
