Talk Back: Consent agendas score a viguple bogey

We can’t play golf worth a lick. Oh, we tried. Once. Talk about a long walk spoiled. Address the ball — hello, ball — then swing and a miss. And swing and a miss. One, two, three strikes yer out. And since we’re honest to a fault, we about busted the calculator keeping track of every one of those whiffs. And you know what else? They gotta make those little scorecards a lot bigger. There’s not enough room to write down 11,217 strokes. On the first hole. Chuck Barris was right.

Some days it just don’t pay to get up.

That’s how it is with golf. Every divot, bunker shot, and ker-sploosh into the drink is something everyone can see. Much like what happens with local government. It’s all out in the open. Except for the part they’d rather you didn’t notice or realize was there. Which is why they have this nifty little device — totally legal, by the way — to make sure certain things pretty much stay hidden.

Even though they’re out in plain sight.

Meet the consent agenda. A mish-mash of action items councils and commissions love to lump under a single heading, then rubber stamp in a one fell swoop so they can wrap up the meeting and move on to the really important things. Like whether Aron will get bonked on the bean by a money-laden suitcase falling out of The Deal or No Deal Island coconut tree that Kim’s just given a good shaking.

Or crossing the road while dressed in a chicken costume.

It’s all in the name of expediency, you see. So that meetings can be kept to five minutes or less. Something that would never happen if they had to deal with each agenda item separately. Oh sure, elected officials could demonstrate what good stewards they are of taxpayer dollars — like they used to 20 or 30 years ago — by publicly flyspecking the bills and demanding the administration explain why they’re so much higher than they ought to be. Or go out of their way to make sure everyone knows the new policy being rammed through is going to cost them an arm and a leg.

But why shine a spotlight on inconsequential stuff like that?

And if they’re about to drop a hundred grand on a souped-up turboprop mowing machine six weeks after the one just like it bit the dust when the blade pulverized a molehill — or demolish half the city block because nothing beats the rush one gets from watching a bunch of buildings faw down an’ go boom — just say as little as possible while lumping them under the heading of “contracts.”

And hope no one’s paying attention.

Make no mistake. They love transparency. So long as it happens only during study sessions, committee meetings, or similar gatherings when few people are watching or listening. Because when the main event rolls around, everyone’s expected to be in kumbaya mode, with the less said the better. And where truth be told, they’d probably prefer everything coming before them be part of the consent process.

How we miss the good old days of two-hour meetings where passionately held beliefs led to knock-down, drag-out donnybrooks that left no question where everyone stood. Where even if something had been endlessly debated during a study session, it was repeated at the regular meeting. So everyone could hear. And where you can be assured if there’d been a consent agenda before them, it would have been met with one word.

A resounding “no.”

Would that even one person today had the guts to say the same.

Talk Back with Doug Spade and Mike Clement is heard every Saturday morning from 9 a.m. to noon Eastern Time at www.localbuzzradio.com, Facebook Live and www.dougspade.com.

This article originally appeared on The Daily Telegram: Doug Spade: Consent agendas score a viguple bogey