A hot evening at City Hall

By the way - on last night's landfill meeting: Brian Derrivan and Tom Jones, the former the Ward 5 councillor and the latter an at-large councillor and 'neighbor' of the landfill, both voted against going into executive session.

It was kind of a surreal, but pleasurable, experience, sitting out in the hall for an hour-and-a-half. I got to know Brenda Reffett better, met and chatted with Kay Lazar, and we all marveled at Stephen Tait's ability to flip a pen into the air and catch it again without even paying particular attention to it - and everyone was joking around about how we could listen in on the executive session.

Even Ed Cameron, when he popped his head out to tell us it would only be 5 minutes more (it was 15), said he was surprised we weren't all pressed up against the door trying to listen in.

"We already tried that," Reffett joked back.

We speculated that if we cheered or booed every once in a while, they'd figure we could hear them anyway and let us back into the room. After a while, we settled in and started talking about such 'hot' topics as home heating costs and options.

The open parts of the meeting were televised, so I imagine anyone who's interested can catch a replay sometime on community cable.

But, to my dismay, only Ward 5 people and a couple other interested parties showed up to the meeting.

Still, despite Ron Klodenski's reservations and his sense that the vote was of the "We reject this deal, but we'll take your trash if you offer us something better" variety, I guess it was a baby step in the right direction.