Mayor Blad brings public comments back to regular city council meetings

POCATELLO, Idaho (KIFI) - In a surprising decision at Monday night's town hall, Pocatello Mayor Brian Blad brought back public comments for all regular city council meetings.

The decision gives the public the ability to offer comments on any concern they have that is not already included on that week's agenda.

Blad made the decision himself back in February to remove the public comment period during scheduled meetings.

It was a decision that he says was his own and that the council disagreed with him.

Blad believes the system was and still is being underutilized and hopes that the community takes advantage of the opportunity to speak.

But Blad says he is worried about the consequences from the decision.

"I promised our community that I would work with the council at the end of the summer to see what the council's desire was," Blad said. "Then for the last month and a half, the council has said, look, I think we should bring it back. And so I finally decided, okay, let's bring it back and see what happens. My concern is now we will have somebody come in and point out something that's an issue, and we now can't do anything about it. We've got to go run it through a process that takes weeks or months where people that said, oh, the mayor said, we can talk to them directly. They reached out to people directly and we were able to get those fixed the next day. My fear is we've now slowed the process back down to the speed of government, opposed to the speed of business."

If you would like to voice your opinion at the next council meeting, you won't have to wait long. The next council meeting is scheduled for Thursday at 6 p.m.