A central strategy of VICC’s leadership seems to be running out the clock. If you represent the status quo faction and seek to foster a do-nothing convention, that can be an effective strategy. By status quo faction, I mean the faction generally supportive of the Legislature’s agenda.

This is reflected in the budget the Legislature allocated to the VICC, which essentially had no money for the VICC to hire independent staff to help research and draft proposals to improve the proposed constitution. The Legislature wants itself, not the convention, to make all changes to the organic act. This is also clear from listening to the public meetings related to the Legislature’s proposed enabling act for VICC.

This is also reflected in VICC’s public records rhetoric vs. action. The rhetoric, as reflected in its public education report, is to champion public access to its proceedings. But the reality has been quite different. The VICC has now used up close to 50% of the time allocated to it in the Legislature’s enabling act, but meeting agendas (as opposed to notices), minutes, video recordings, transcripts, and supporting documents, have all, with few exceptions, not been made meaningfully accessible to the public. If it waits until the end of the convention process to make those documents available, then claims about its commitment to public participation in the process become a farce.

Given the very limited time available to meet, an excessive amount of time has been allocated to procedural rather than substantive issues. This also supports a status quo, take-it-or-leave-it agenda.

At this point, it appears that the public education committee was misnamed. Despite its own rhetoric, it should have been named the PR committee. The $150,000 the Legislature allocated to public education will, in practice, be used almost exclusively for PR to sell the proposed convention to the public.