The Erie Times News's much bally-hooed treatment of Tom Ridge's new book in today's edition penned by Reporter John Guerriero sets a new standard for mediocrity.
It consists primarily of an interview of Ridge, the first and former secretary of the U.S. Dept. of Homeland Security in the last Bush administration, Pennsylvania governor and Northwest PA congressman.
One wonders whether the reporter bothered to read the book, of which the Times-News boasted it had received an advance review copy, proclaiming it would present "the first print interview" based on the book, due for release Tuesday. An enterprising newspaper would have presented a package consisting of a full-blown critical review and a sidebar interview. But no one has ever accused the Times-News of being enterprising.
There is no independent critical analysis of the book or Ridge's comments on it, nor any quotes or comments from other political figures or prominent commentators in a position to present informed commentary either critical or supportive of the content of Ridge's memoirs.
There is only Ridge's self-serving self-analysis, a simulacrum of a playwright who writes a critique of his own play. Nothing in the "review" complements the book's bland title, "The Test of Our Times."
If there's anything "new" or original in the book, the reporter failed to ferret it out, possibly because he quickly scanned the index and selective passages, rather than reading it in toto, the Cliff Notes approach.
The Times-News had a rare opportunity for a national "scoop," but blew it on a pandering epistle predictably massaging the inflated Ridge ego.
Headlined "Ridge book offers Beltway insight," the article consists mostly of hindsight.
Much is made of the already exhausted "buzz" over whether Bush administration officials, including the president, pressured Ridge to raise the color code alarm just prior to the 2004 general election in order to boost his reelection prospects over the Democrat nominee John Kerry. Ridge denies there was any pressure, according to the article, although the issue was debated among administration officials, with the consensus, which included Ridge, prevailing against heightening the color code.
Lost in this contrived and politically inspired imbroglio raised by Democrats and liberal media to embarrass the Bush administration is the reality that terroristic threats are always more likely within the context of a national election, and proposals to raise the alarm appropos terrorism are fully justified. Check out the recent elections in Iraq and Afghanistan. Terroristic suicide bombings have plagued their electorates.
The reporter writes: "Despite his disagreement with the GOP over the Chambliss campaign commercial and some of his conflicts in the Bush administration, Ridge said he plans to stay involved with the Republican Party. 'I think I can still offer some advice and support and counsel and be a force within the party. Time will tell,' he said."
But Ridge, a faux Republican a la Arlen Specter is more likely to be viewed, at least within the GOP's conservative wing, as a prospective turncoat, the spy within, given his deprecating comments thereof. His "involvement" may be suspect and unwelcome. So far, he's been more of a "force" for the opposing party than for the one to which he putatively belongs.
Sunday, August 30, 2009
Thursday, August 27, 2009
Hubbert's "Peak Oil" theory debunked
Not too long ago I wrote in this blog a brief essay pooh-poohing the prevalent theory that both U.S. and global oil production had already or soon would "peak," as consumption outran remaining and diminishing petroleum reserves. One commenter took me to task for presuming to criticise Author Hubbert's "peak oil" theory. Here's what I wrote back in 2008:
For several years now, the conventional wisdom has subscribed to a theory called "peak oil," which stands for the proposition that at some point the availability of petroleum reserves reached a peak in the United States and began irreversibly dwindling.
The theory was first advanced by a book entitled Hubbert's Peak, whose central premise holds that U.S. domestic petroleum supplies peaked in 1970. But it's deeply flawed by a major factual error.
The author failed to take into account the fact that how much producible oil remains within domestic oil provinces depends entirely upon the going market price for oil. For example, at $100 per barrel, much more oil is producible than at $50. Pick your figures.
On Alaska's North Slope, both onshore and offshore, more than 14 billion barrels of oil have been produced since its inception in 1977, flowing at rates ranging between about 1 million and 2 million barrels per day. Nearby is a deposit of what is known as 'heavy oil,' not unlike the Athabasca tar sands in northwestern Canada, which exploratory drilling has shown contains an estimated 20 billion barrels of oil.
However, because of reservoir dynamics, these reserves are not economically producible at today's market prices for oil, but will eventually be producible at some higher figure depending upon demand.
There are scores of unexplored areas throughout the U.S. both onshore and offshore in state oceanic waters up to the three-mile limit and between three and 12 miles in federal waters overlying the outer continental shelf. Billions of barrels of oil may underlie the tundra in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR), as well as the National Petroleum Reserve, Alaska.
Neither Mr. Hubbert, nor anyone, can know when or where more oil may be found until all these prospective areas are identified. In short, Mr. Hubbert has presumed to identify and quantify a natural resource, which is unidentifiable and unquantifiable without further exploration activities.
Thus, his central premise is nonsensical. Mr. Hubbert's research is formidable, but his mind set has led him to the wrong conclusions. This same rationale applies to his similarly erroneous thesis regarding global 'peak oil.'
Here's an analysis from today's New York Times which vindicates my view.
New York Times Op-Ed Contributor
‘Peak Oil’ Is a Waste of Energy
August 27. 2009
By Michael Lynch
(Michael Lynch, the former director for Asian energy and security at the Center for International Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is an energy consultant.)
REMEMBER “peak oil”? It’s the theory that geological scarcity will at some point make it impossible for global petroleum production to avoid falling, heralding the end of the oil age and, potentially, economic catastrophe. Well, just when we thought that the collapse in oil prices since last summer had put an end to such talk, along comes Fatih Birol, the top economist at the International Energy Agency, to insist that we’ll reach the peak moment in 10 years, a decade sooner than most previous predictions (although a few ardent pessimists believe the moment of no return has already come and gone).
Like many Malthusian beliefs, peak oil theory has been promoted by a motivated group of scientists and laymen who base their conclusions on poor analyses of data and misinterpretations of technical material. But because the news media and prominent figures like James Schlesinger, a former secretary of energy, and the oilman T. Boone Pickens have taken peak oil seriously, the public is understandably alarmed.
A careful examination of the facts shows that most arguments about peak oil are based on anecdotal information, vague references and ignorance of how the oil industry goes about finding fields and extracting petroleum. And this has been demonstrated over and over again: the founder of the Association for the Study of Peak Oil first claimed in 1989 that the peak had already been reached, and Mr. Schlesinger argued a decade earlier that production was unlikely to ever go much higher.
Mr. Birol isn’t the only one still worrying. One leading proponent of peak oil, the writer Paul Roberts, recently expressed shock to discover that the liquid coming out of the Ghawar Field in Saudi Arabia, the world’s largest known deposit, is around 35 percent water and rising. But this is hardly a concern — the buildup is caused by the Saudis pumping seawater into the field to keep pressure up and make extraction easier. The global average for water in oil field yields is estimated to be as high as 75 percent.
Another critic, a prominent consultant and investor named Matthew Simmons, has raised concerns over oil engineers using “fuzzy logic” to estimate reservoir holdings. But fuzzy logic is a programming method that has been used since I was in graduate school in situations where the factors are hazy and variable — everything from physical science to international relations — and its track record in oil geology has been quite good.
But those are just the latest arguments — for the most part the peak-oil crowd rests its case on three major claims: that the world is discovering only one barrel for every three or four produced; that political instability in oil-producing countries puts us at an unprecedented risk of having the spigots turned off; and that we have already used half of the two trillion barrels of oil that the earth contained.
Let’s take the rate-of-discovery argument first: it is a statement that reflects ignorance of industry terminology. When a new field is found, it is given a size estimate that indicates how much is thought to be recoverable at that point in time. But as years pass, the estimate is almost always revised upward, either because more pockets of oil are found in the field or because new technology makes it possible to extract oil that was previously unreachable. Yet because petroleum geologists don’t report that additional recoverable oil as “newly discovered,” the peak oil advocates tend to ignore it. In truth, the combination of new discoveries and revisions to size estimates of older fields has been keeping pace with production for many years.
A related argument — that the “easy oil” is gone and that extraction can only become more difficult and cost-ineffective — should be recognized as vague and irrelevant. Drillers in Persia a century ago certainly didn’t consider their work easy, and the mechanized, computerized industry of today is a far sight from 19th-century mule-drawn rigs. Hundreds of fields that produce “easy oil” today were once thought technologically unreachable.
The latest acorn in the discovery debate is a recent increase in the overall estimated rate at which production is declining in large oil fields. This is assumed to be the result of the “superstraw” technologies that have become dominant over the past decade, which can drain fields faster than ever. True, because quicker extraction causes the fluid pressure in the field to drop rapidly, the wells become less and less productive over time. But this declining return on individual wells doesn’t necessarily mean that whole fields are being cleaned out. As the Saudis have proved in recent years at Ghawar, additional investment — to find new deposits and drill new wells — can keep a field’s overall production from falling.
When their shaky claims on geology are exposed, the peak-oil advocates tend to argue that today’s geopolitical instability needs to be taken into consideration. But political risk is hardly new: a leading Communist labor organizer in the Baku oil industry in the early 1900s would later be known to the world as Josef Stalin.
When the large supply disruptions of 1973 and 1979 led to skyrocketing prices, nearly all oil experts said the underlying cause was resource scarcity and that prices would go ever higher in the future. The oil companies diversified their investments — Mobil even started buying up department stores! — and President Jimmy Carter pushed for the development of synthetic fuels like shale oil, arguing that markets were too myopic to realize the imminent need for substitutes. All sorts of policy wonks, energy consultants and Nobel-prize-winning economists jumped on the bandwagon to explain that prices would only go up — even though they had never done so historically. Prices instead proceeded to slide for two decades, rather as the tide ignored King Canute.
Just as, in the 1970s, it was the Arab oil embargo and the Iranian Revolution, today it is the invasion of Iraq and instability in Venezuela and Nigeria. But the solution, as ever, is for the industry to shift investment into new regions, and that’s what it is doing. Yet peak-oil advocates take advantage of the inevitable delay in bringing this new production on line to claim that global production is on an irreversible decline.
In the end, perhaps the most misleading claim of the peak-oil advocates is that the earth was endowed with only 2 trillion barrels of “recoverable” oil. Actually, the consensus among geologists is that there are some 10 trillion barrels out there. A century ago, only 10 percent of it was considered recoverable, but improvements in technology should allow us to recover some 35 percent — another 2.5 trillion barrels — in an economically viable way. And this doesn’t even include such potential sources as tar sands, which in time we may be able to efficiently tap.
Oil remains abundant, and the price will likely come down closer to the historical level of $30 a barrel as new supplies come forward in the deep waters off West Africa and Latin America, in East Africa, and perhaps in the Bakken oil shale fields of Montana and North Dakota. But that may not keep the Chicken Littles from convincing policymakers in Washington and elsewhere that oil, being finite, must increase in price. (That’s the logic that led the Carter administration to create the Synthetic Fuels Corporation, a $3 billion boondoggle that never produced a gallon of useable fuel.)
This is not to say that we shouldn’t keep looking for other cost-effective, low-pollution energy sources — why not broaden our options? But we can’t let the false threat of disappearing oil lead the government to throw money away on harebrained renewable energy schemes or impose unnecessary and expensive conservation measures on a public already struggling through tough economic times.
For several years now, the conventional wisdom has subscribed to a theory called "peak oil," which stands for the proposition that at some point the availability of petroleum reserves reached a peak in the United States and began irreversibly dwindling.
The theory was first advanced by a book entitled Hubbert's Peak, whose central premise holds that U.S. domestic petroleum supplies peaked in 1970. But it's deeply flawed by a major factual error.
The author failed to take into account the fact that how much producible oil remains within domestic oil provinces depends entirely upon the going market price for oil. For example, at $100 per barrel, much more oil is producible than at $50. Pick your figures.
On Alaska's North Slope, both onshore and offshore, more than 14 billion barrels of oil have been produced since its inception in 1977, flowing at rates ranging between about 1 million and 2 million barrels per day. Nearby is a deposit of what is known as 'heavy oil,' not unlike the Athabasca tar sands in northwestern Canada, which exploratory drilling has shown contains an estimated 20 billion barrels of oil.
However, because of reservoir dynamics, these reserves are not economically producible at today's market prices for oil, but will eventually be producible at some higher figure depending upon demand.
There are scores of unexplored areas throughout the U.S. both onshore and offshore in state oceanic waters up to the three-mile limit and between three and 12 miles in federal waters overlying the outer continental shelf. Billions of barrels of oil may underlie the tundra in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR), as well as the National Petroleum Reserve, Alaska.
Neither Mr. Hubbert, nor anyone, can know when or where more oil may be found until all these prospective areas are identified. In short, Mr. Hubbert has presumed to identify and quantify a natural resource, which is unidentifiable and unquantifiable without further exploration activities.
Thus, his central premise is nonsensical. Mr. Hubbert's research is formidable, but his mind set has led him to the wrong conclusions. This same rationale applies to his similarly erroneous thesis regarding global 'peak oil.'
Here's an analysis from today's New York Times which vindicates my view.
New York Times Op-Ed Contributor
‘Peak Oil’ Is a Waste of Energy
August 27. 2009
By Michael Lynch
(Michael Lynch, the former director for Asian energy and security at the Center for International Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is an energy consultant.)
REMEMBER “peak oil”? It’s the theory that geological scarcity will at some point make it impossible for global petroleum production to avoid falling, heralding the end of the oil age and, potentially, economic catastrophe. Well, just when we thought that the collapse in oil prices since last summer had put an end to such talk, along comes Fatih Birol, the top economist at the International Energy Agency, to insist that we’ll reach the peak moment in 10 years, a decade sooner than most previous predictions (although a few ardent pessimists believe the moment of no return has already come and gone).
Like many Malthusian beliefs, peak oil theory has been promoted by a motivated group of scientists and laymen who base their conclusions on poor analyses of data and misinterpretations of technical material. But because the news media and prominent figures like James Schlesinger, a former secretary of energy, and the oilman T. Boone Pickens have taken peak oil seriously, the public is understandably alarmed.
A careful examination of the facts shows that most arguments about peak oil are based on anecdotal information, vague references and ignorance of how the oil industry goes about finding fields and extracting petroleum. And this has been demonstrated over and over again: the founder of the Association for the Study of Peak Oil first claimed in 1989 that the peak had already been reached, and Mr. Schlesinger argued a decade earlier that production was unlikely to ever go much higher.
Mr. Birol isn’t the only one still worrying. One leading proponent of peak oil, the writer Paul Roberts, recently expressed shock to discover that the liquid coming out of the Ghawar Field in Saudi Arabia, the world’s largest known deposit, is around 35 percent water and rising. But this is hardly a concern — the buildup is caused by the Saudis pumping seawater into the field to keep pressure up and make extraction easier. The global average for water in oil field yields is estimated to be as high as 75 percent.
Another critic, a prominent consultant and investor named Matthew Simmons, has raised concerns over oil engineers using “fuzzy logic” to estimate reservoir holdings. But fuzzy logic is a programming method that has been used since I was in graduate school in situations where the factors are hazy and variable — everything from physical science to international relations — and its track record in oil geology has been quite good.
But those are just the latest arguments — for the most part the peak-oil crowd rests its case on three major claims: that the world is discovering only one barrel for every three or four produced; that political instability in oil-producing countries puts us at an unprecedented risk of having the spigots turned off; and that we have already used half of the two trillion barrels of oil that the earth contained.
Let’s take the rate-of-discovery argument first: it is a statement that reflects ignorance of industry terminology. When a new field is found, it is given a size estimate that indicates how much is thought to be recoverable at that point in time. But as years pass, the estimate is almost always revised upward, either because more pockets of oil are found in the field or because new technology makes it possible to extract oil that was previously unreachable. Yet because petroleum geologists don’t report that additional recoverable oil as “newly discovered,” the peak oil advocates tend to ignore it. In truth, the combination of new discoveries and revisions to size estimates of older fields has been keeping pace with production for many years.
A related argument — that the “easy oil” is gone and that extraction can only become more difficult and cost-ineffective — should be recognized as vague and irrelevant. Drillers in Persia a century ago certainly didn’t consider their work easy, and the mechanized, computerized industry of today is a far sight from 19th-century mule-drawn rigs. Hundreds of fields that produce “easy oil” today were once thought technologically unreachable.
The latest acorn in the discovery debate is a recent increase in the overall estimated rate at which production is declining in large oil fields. This is assumed to be the result of the “superstraw” technologies that have become dominant over the past decade, which can drain fields faster than ever. True, because quicker extraction causes the fluid pressure in the field to drop rapidly, the wells become less and less productive over time. But this declining return on individual wells doesn’t necessarily mean that whole fields are being cleaned out. As the Saudis have proved in recent years at Ghawar, additional investment — to find new deposits and drill new wells — can keep a field’s overall production from falling.
When their shaky claims on geology are exposed, the peak-oil advocates tend to argue that today’s geopolitical instability needs to be taken into consideration. But political risk is hardly new: a leading Communist labor organizer in the Baku oil industry in the early 1900s would later be known to the world as Josef Stalin.
When the large supply disruptions of 1973 and 1979 led to skyrocketing prices, nearly all oil experts said the underlying cause was resource scarcity and that prices would go ever higher in the future. The oil companies diversified their investments — Mobil even started buying up department stores! — and President Jimmy Carter pushed for the development of synthetic fuels like shale oil, arguing that markets were too myopic to realize the imminent need for substitutes. All sorts of policy wonks, energy consultants and Nobel-prize-winning economists jumped on the bandwagon to explain that prices would only go up — even though they had never done so historically. Prices instead proceeded to slide for two decades, rather as the tide ignored King Canute.
Just as, in the 1970s, it was the Arab oil embargo and the Iranian Revolution, today it is the invasion of Iraq and instability in Venezuela and Nigeria. But the solution, as ever, is for the industry to shift investment into new regions, and that’s what it is doing. Yet peak-oil advocates take advantage of the inevitable delay in bringing this new production on line to claim that global production is on an irreversible decline.
In the end, perhaps the most misleading claim of the peak-oil advocates is that the earth was endowed with only 2 trillion barrels of “recoverable” oil. Actually, the consensus among geologists is that there are some 10 trillion barrels out there. A century ago, only 10 percent of it was considered recoverable, but improvements in technology should allow us to recover some 35 percent — another 2.5 trillion barrels — in an economically viable way. And this doesn’t even include such potential sources as tar sands, which in time we may be able to efficiently tap.
Oil remains abundant, and the price will likely come down closer to the historical level of $30 a barrel as new supplies come forward in the deep waters off West Africa and Latin America, in East Africa, and perhaps in the Bakken oil shale fields of Montana and North Dakota. But that may not keep the Chicken Littles from convincing policymakers in Washington and elsewhere that oil, being finite, must increase in price. (That’s the logic that led the Carter administration to create the Synthetic Fuels Corporation, a $3 billion boondoggle that never produced a gallon of useable fuel.)
This is not to say that we shouldn’t keep looking for other cost-effective, low-pollution energy sources — why not broaden our options? But we can’t let the false threat of disappearing oil lead the government to throw money away on harebrained renewable energy schemes or impose unnecessary and expensive conservation measures on a public already struggling through tough economic times.
Monday, August 10, 2009
Times-News neglects landmark First Amendment court decision in Erie federal court
The news room at the Erie Times-News has once again displayed its incompetence and egregious lack of journalistic ethics and professionalism by grossly underplaying a major story with profound First Amendment implications statewide and beyond because of petty local politics and animosity by Managing Editor Pat Howard, other top editors and reporters Kevin Flowers and Ed Pallatella towards the principal actor and local citizen hero, Dan Galena, in a law suit decided in federal district court last week.
Against all odds, bucking the local political establishment and the biased but influential monopoly daily newspaper in northwestern Pa., Galena stunningly prevailed in federal court last week after a jury trial upheld his contention that Erie County Council Chairman Leone Fiore and other council members violated the state’s open meetings, or “Sunshine” law, its own County Code and his civil rights by having him forcibly ejected from a council meeting by a sheriff’s deputy back in March of 2007 when he vocally protested the legality of council’s procedure in adopting ordinances.
The court ordered council to pay Galena $5,000 and all attorney and court costs. According to one estimate, the law suit will have cost Erie County taxpayers about $100,000 to defend.
Since the questionable procedure used for years by county council to move an ordinance from first to second reading on the same day at the same meeting is utilized by virtually every municipal legislative body in the commonwealth of Pennsylvania, the federal court verdict upholding Galena’s position is certain to have widespread repercussions throughout the state.
The procedure effectively denies the public a full hearing and opportunity to comment timely on council actions. Under law, ordinances must have two separate readings on two separate days before council can take final action adopting them. It’s a way of making sure that members of the public have ample time to consider the ramifications of proposed ordinances and comment on and favor or oppose them before council takes final action on them.
Although the Times-News carried a few sketchy stories on Galena’s law suit as it progressed through the court system, as well as minimal reporting of the jury verdict in his favor last week, the newspaper vastly underplayed the magnitude of the verdict’s implications throughout the commonwealth, and failed to give Galena due credit for perservering in the face of overwhelming odds, including callous attempts by Leone and other members of council to intimidate him brutally.
Ironically, it’s the kind of official wrongdoing involving freedom of the press and the public’s right to know which the local news media should take the lead in exposing, but failed miserably to do so. Instead The Times-News and the rest of the local news media largely ignored Galena’s public-spirited crusade against the errant council and its arrogant chairman’s attempt to hold themselves above the law, failing to give the issue the prominent coverage it deserves, or lauding him for pursuing his strongly-held convictions in court at considerable personal expense and sacrifice.
The Times-News frequently editorializes in favor of open meetings under the state’s Sunshine law, freedom of the press and public access to public information in the hands of government, but ignored this important First Amendment violation occurring right under its nose, and failing to take Galena’s lawsuit seriously because of internal hostility towards Galena for his frequent and sharp criticisim of its news and editorial coverage often expressed in his angry letters to the editor which the Times-News never publishes.
In his defense against Galena’s charges of violations of the Sunshine law and the County Code, Leone said he ordered Galena out of the courthouse during a council meeting on March 20 , 2007 because he was “disruptive” when he objected to council’s attempt to move an ordinance from first to second reading on the same day. Leone said council has set aside a public hearing period near the opening of council meeting to allow fpr public comment.
However, since council’s action on the ordinance came after the public hearing, there was no opportunity for Galena to comment on it prior to that action. Moreover, the state’s Sunshine law expressly allows anyone to raise an objection against council action at any time during a meeting if there is a perceived violation of the Sunshine law.
Against all odds, bucking the local political establishment and the biased but influential monopoly daily newspaper in northwestern Pa., Galena stunningly prevailed in federal court last week after a jury trial upheld his contention that Erie County Council Chairman Leone Fiore and other council members violated the state’s open meetings, or “Sunshine” law, its own County Code and his civil rights by having him forcibly ejected from a council meeting by a sheriff’s deputy back in March of 2007 when he vocally protested the legality of council’s procedure in adopting ordinances.
The court ordered council to pay Galena $5,000 and all attorney and court costs. According to one estimate, the law suit will have cost Erie County taxpayers about $100,000 to defend.
Since the questionable procedure used for years by county council to move an ordinance from first to second reading on the same day at the same meeting is utilized by virtually every municipal legislative body in the commonwealth of Pennsylvania, the federal court verdict upholding Galena’s position is certain to have widespread repercussions throughout the state.
The procedure effectively denies the public a full hearing and opportunity to comment timely on council actions. Under law, ordinances must have two separate readings on two separate days before council can take final action adopting them. It’s a way of making sure that members of the public have ample time to consider the ramifications of proposed ordinances and comment on and favor or oppose them before council takes final action on them.
Although the Times-News carried a few sketchy stories on Galena’s law suit as it progressed through the court system, as well as minimal reporting of the jury verdict in his favor last week, the newspaper vastly underplayed the magnitude of the verdict’s implications throughout the commonwealth, and failed to give Galena due credit for perservering in the face of overwhelming odds, including callous attempts by Leone and other members of council to intimidate him brutally.
Ironically, it’s the kind of official wrongdoing involving freedom of the press and the public’s right to know which the local news media should take the lead in exposing, but failed miserably to do so. Instead The Times-News and the rest of the local news media largely ignored Galena’s public-spirited crusade against the errant council and its arrogant chairman’s attempt to hold themselves above the law, failing to give the issue the prominent coverage it deserves, or lauding him for pursuing his strongly-held convictions in court at considerable personal expense and sacrifice.
The Times-News frequently editorializes in favor of open meetings under the state’s Sunshine law, freedom of the press and public access to public information in the hands of government, but ignored this important First Amendment violation occurring right under its nose, and failing to take Galena’s lawsuit seriously because of internal hostility towards Galena for his frequent and sharp criticisim of its news and editorial coverage often expressed in his angry letters to the editor which the Times-News never publishes.
In his defense against Galena’s charges of violations of the Sunshine law and the County Code, Leone said he ordered Galena out of the courthouse during a council meeting on March 20 , 2007 because he was “disruptive” when he objected to council’s attempt to move an ordinance from first to second reading on the same day. Leone said council has set aside a public hearing period near the opening of council meeting to allow fpr public comment.
However, since council’s action on the ordinance came after the public hearing, there was no opportunity for Galena to comment on it prior to that action. Moreover, the state’s Sunshine law expressly allows anyone to raise an objection against council action at any time during a meeting if there is a perceived violation of the Sunshine law.
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