For instance, I'm sure the Mayor had a good time when I went up to make a statement about Channel 16 recently; an issue on which the Mayor and I have opposing viewpoints - he's afraid of it.  The Mayor interrupted me repeatedly and even cracked a joke during my statement about how stupid the idea of yielding time was.  When the Mayor finally allowed me to finish after six minutes and I was leaving, he summoned me back and announced that the he had changed the "rules".

The new "unwritten" rule is that the Mayor is no longer going to let people yield their minutes to another speaker.  A practice that has been allowed in the past - and at that time three people had yielded their time to me.  The 
new rule is that if someone has a long statement they must announce it and the Council will vote yes or no on allowing extra time.  So, a speaker did just that at the next meeting, and, guess what, there was no vote.  The 
Mayor just said "no, I will not entertain that."  What happened to Bob's new rule?  Oh, he must have changed it again and didn't bother telling anyone.

Please stick to the accepted rule of letting people yield their time or ask the council for a vote.  Either way is fine with me as long as we have fairness.  A few words have been added on the sign-in form asking people to 
"Please observe the 3-minute time limit."  Added to that should be:  "Time may be yielded to another speaker."  That way, we'll have a good basic set of fair written rules and the minutes used would actually be the same.

The practice of "yielding time," is used in Congress, and is certainly nothing new that I dreamed up.  It's an excellent idea and we should adopt it here on Key Biscayne since this has become an issue.  Of course, if the 
plan is to silence residents, like our Village Government is doing on Channel 16, that's one thing.

The Mayor should not be allowed to change the rules whimsically depending on how he feels at that particular moment, or more importantly, how he feels about a particular speaker and the topic.  In fact, we should not leave 
these things up to him.  He has confused speakers too much already and he has not shown fairness.  The entire Council should weigh in and decide how they want to handle this issue.  My recommendation is that we follow the 
lead of the U.S. Congress.

Key Biscayne Firefighters desire to have fully manned firetrucks

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