Unalaska, AK – The Unalaska City Council is far from agreement on several changes to how it holds meetings. That was the take-home message of Thursday's work session, the first in the council's tentative new meeting format, in which council members debated a raft of procedural changes that they supposedly agreed upon at the council's December 30 workshop.

A letter circulated by Mayor Shirley Marquardt summarizing the changes implied that the five council members who were at the workshop were in agreement on them. But as the discussion progressed, it became clear that council agreed on hardly any of them, a situation that perplexed council member Juanita Lewis.

"It seems as though everything we agreed upon at the meeting is being tossed out the window, which completely confuses me, because then what was the purpose of the meeting?" she said.

The proposed changes include separating work sessions from regular meetings and holding the work sessions in the library conference room, which is considerably smaller than the council chambers at City Hall. The meetings would be held on alternating weeks, with work sessions held on an as-needed basis.

Another change involves restricting public comment to the beginning and end of council meetings. For now, the council requests public input after each agenda item, and this change would put an end to that. Marquardt's letter also floats the possibility of renovating the council's City Hall space so that council members can face each other and communicate better, although there isn't any concrete proposal on the table yet.

But several council members distanced themselves from most if not all of these changes at Thursday's meeting. Those included Joanna Aldridge, who wasn't present for the workshop where the changes were agreed upon, but also Katherine McGlashan and Kris Flanagan, who were. McGlashan questioned the need to split work sessions and meetings, and said she had heard complaints from members of the public about the shift to the library space.

"I had a lot of comments on, 'What's the council trying to hide? Why are they moving? We have a nice facility at City Hall, why are we having it here?'" she said. "So I'd like to see how this meeting works, and then make a decision."

Both Aldridge and Flanagan spoke out against remodeling the City Hall chambers, an idea they characterized as expensive and unnecessary.

Splitting off the work session didn't do much for the length of Thursday's meeting--it stretched to three hours, double the scheduled time on the agenda.