BrandonInfo.com

The City Council story on www.brandon.info.com today says one word in the following portion of the proposed city ambulance ordinance is incorrect. According to Council members, the verb “shall” in the following section should instead be “may.”

“The City of Brandon shall by resolution designate a medical doctor having staff privileges at a major trauma center hospital in Sioux Falls, SD, to conduct a review or reviews of licensed services, their employees, and each request for service to which a licensed ambulance service responds withing the City of Brandon.”

This brings to my mind the following questions. Do you know the answers to any of them? If so, please post them here. In addition, I’m hoping City Council members will answer these questions at Wednesday’s public forum, which will be held at 7 p.m. at the Brandon Municipal Golf Course Community Room.

I understand that there will be no moderator for the forum, but City Council members will be on hand to answer questions, as well as the mayor and the city attorney. In addition, the Council has invited representatives from Rural Metro, the deputy state’s attorney, the medical director for REMSA and the county, Brandon Volunteer Fire Department, Brandon Police Department and the state emergency medical services. Representatives from some or all of these groups may or may not be in the audience.

There’s an old saying that “Government is run by those who show up.” You, who are reading this, should be one of the people who show up. I hope you do.

Here are my questions based on today’s City Council story:

1. Hypothetically, what is the proper procedure to follow if an ordinance gets published with a mistake in it, whatever that mistake may be? It might be that an earlier version of the ordinance gets published by accident. It might be something as simple as a typo that changes the meaning of the ordinance. There must exist rules dictating how that should be handled. What are they? In this case, it looks like the word “shall” was in an earlier draft of the ordinance and that Council members chose to change that verb to “may.” They approved the second reading of the ordinance believing it said “may.” Yet, for whatever reason, the ordinance was published Dec. 13 with the word “shall.”

2. It also looks like, whatever the procedures are to correct such a mistake, these steps were not taken. Ideally, you’d think someone would have brought it up at the next council meeting after the Dec. 13 publication. It looks like nobody even mentioned the discrepancy until March, even though the ordinance was published in December. Why is that?

3. Now that the discrepancy has been identified, are there any steps the City Council can take to fix it before the election? And if not, do they intend to change “shall” to “may” if the ordinance passes April 10? That would require another first and second reading with publication and a 20-day wait, correct?

Cearly, there are many other reasons to vote for or against the ordinance than just this one verb. But it’s one of the issues of controversy in the ordinance. Let’s make sure we all know what we’re voting on before we go to the polls April 10.