City Council Simulation Analysis

The City Council, the first thing I think about is a bunch of old politicians sitting in a room arguing. While our simulation wasn’t exactly accurate, it did help me better appreciate what these people do. It’s more than just sitting around and complaining, they have the power to affect our everyday life. Through this process I learned many different things, for example, ever meeting begins with the Pledge of Allegiance, which wasn’t that surprising, and a prayer from any religion, which surprised me a lot. The next thing I learned was just how technical these ordinances were, the wording had to be very specific and can be exploited if it wasn’t. Even in our simulation there were instances were a loophole could be used to get around an ordinance. I also learned how amending an ordinance can send you down a bit of a rabbit hole, everyone wants to make there little tweaks which can end up making the ordinance impossible to enforce. This worries me a bit because an ordinance that could really benefit the community can be manipulated so much that it ends up doing absolutely nothing. I was fairly surprised by how many good ordinances we were able to come up with. You don’t have to be a seasoned politician to come up with them, for instance, Pat Hennelly’s ordinance

The fact that the entirety of discussion was left up to us as the aldermen excited me, I was curious to see what we were able to come up with. I was shocked that a class of inexperienced students could have legitimate conversations on topics which other students brought in. This was evident when the class started to amend Joshua Johnson’s ordinance, we weren’t too sure what to do if the car that was booted was worthless and couldn’t sell at an auction. Our final decision was to sell it to a scrap yard if it no longer had any value to