Published: March 22, 2008 12:49 am            

CLARKSVILLE: Not everyone happy with meeting-time change

After more than a decade of Tuesday night meetings, the Clarksville Town Council recently voted unanimously in a matter of minutes to move council meetings to Mondays.

Council members not only changed the day of the meeting, but the week it is held. Council meetings had been the second and fourth Tuesday of every month since January 1996.

The move — which means council meetings will be held at 7 p.m. the first and third Monday of the month — means Clarksville meetings will conflict with meetings of the Jeffersonville City Council, the Charlestown City Council and the Sellersburg Town Council in Clark County. Jeffersonville and Charlestown hold council meetings the first and third Monday of the month and Sellersburg holds council meetings the third Monday of the month; Charlestown meetings are at 6:30 p.m., Sellersburg meetings are at 7 p.m. and Jeffersonville meetings are at 7:30 p.m.

“I don’t worry about Jeffersonville and Charlestown,” said Council Vice President Greg Isgrigg.

The meeting move in Clarksville will make it difficult for county residents who want to attend that council meeting and the Jeffersonville council meeting to do so.

“It’s unfortunate Clarksville did that, because some people have a more regional interest and would like to attend other meetings,” said Tom DeArk, a Clarksville resident who regularly attends both meetings. “I live in Clarksville. I plan to regularly attend all the Clarksville meetings I can and I’ll attend other municipalities’ meetings including Jeffersonville as I can.”

Scheduling conflicts among Clarksville Town Council members led to the move and other council meetings around the county did not factor into the decision, according to Isgrigg and Council President Paul Kraft.

Isgrigg said a council member’s wife has medical concerns and her caretaker had a scheduling conflict on Tuesdays, “so that’s why we changed, her schedule changed,” Isgrigg said. However, Kraft said the move was made “mostly because one councilman was having trouble making meetings because of a job. It was becoming a little hard for everybody to get there Tuesday.”

Kraft said that the only conflict with the Monday meetings is the Clarksville Board of Zoning Appeals meeting.

Councilman Don Tetley said he doesn’t understand why people living outside Clarksville would be interested in business discussed at its town council meetings.

“I didn’t know anybody that would want to spend the time going to something that didn’t pertain to them,” he said. “I never did know exactly when Jeff’s [council] met.”

Councilman David Fisher suggested the meeting change and “picked out the dates,” Tetley said. He said he never thought about the potential conflict with other council meetings and didn’t know why the week the meetings are held was changed in addition to the day.

“Obviously, I can’t be in two places at one time. My primary concern has always been Jeffersonville,” said Mike Hutt, a Jeffersonville resident who regularly attends Jeffersonville and Clarksville council meetings. “I used to go to Clarksville to have a good laugh because their government is anything but transparent. They don’t like anybody asking questions or watching what they do, and all of a sudden [people ask questions] and it’s making some of them nervous.”

        

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