The Regional Task Force on the Extra Hour concluded its six-month study Tuesday by awarding the fall-back’s bonus hour to the City Council, which promptly wasted it on a 60-minute debate about whether the hour should be observed ‘in a single sitting or broken into quarters.’
‘We considered giving the hour to nurses, new parents, or air-traffic controllers,’ said task force chair Dr. Lena Vasquez. ‘But the council submitted a 40-page proposal with pie charts, and frankly, we were tired.’
The council spent the first 20 minutes of its gifted hour arguing over the pronunciation of ‘temporal,’ the next 20 minutes on a motion to table the discussion until the hour had passed, and the final 20 minutes ‘just sitting there, watching it go,’ according to the official minutes.
Councilwoman Diane Pratt defended the expenditure. ‘This is democracy,’ she said. ‘Slow, procedural democracy, conducted inside a free hour of time that we did nothing to earn.’
Public response was swift. ‘They got MY hour?’ said night-shift worker Marcus Webb. ‘I was going to use that hour to sleep. They used it to say the word temporal fourteen times. I counted. I was awake anyway.’
The task force has recommended that next year’s extra hour be ‘held in escrow’ until a worthier recipient can be identified. Nominations open in March, close in November, and will be reviewed ‘whenever.’
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