Having covered Atascadero City Council meetings for many years, I’ve found that city staff and council try to cover too many issues in one night, making the meetings last well into the night.

I recall the council deciding to start the meetings at 6 p.m. rather than 7 p.m. as a means to keep the meetings from going into the next day.

While meetings aren’t regularly running into the next day, they do often last up to or past 11 p.m.

I see many problems with the meetings regularly running late into the evening:

1. The council members’ minds aren’t as clear as they are earlier in the evening. Some decisions may be made in a effort to have the meeting finished earlier.

2. Community members are left out of the process because they are unwilling or unable to wait until 11 p.m., midnight or later for their issue to go before the council.

A couple of months ago, I talked to Lon Allan about an issue he had gone to the council to speak about. His item was the last one seen at the end of a seven-hour meeting. Besides the council and city staff, he was one of few — maybe the only, I couldn’t make it that late — community members still there.

This summer, the council meetings in July and August have been reduced to one meeting per month. I think one solution would be to have more than two meetings a month, rather than less.

I’d rather attend an extra meeting or two that would be shorter than two or less that run past my bedtime and once we get that late, I have difficulty concentrating. I have no doubt that the same goes for council members, city staff and other community members.

The council speaks so frequently about allowing more access to the public, but I think the late meetings do not offer that. Instead, it leads to more decisions being made without public input and unclear minds.