Speakers at Common Council meetings are generally allowed five minutes to speak their piece. But council members often ask follow-up questions.
Sometimes a questioning alder tries to trip up a speaker in an exaggerated cross-examination, desperately seeking a gotcha moment. More often, the alder just wants to give a speaker more time.
This was presumably the case at the Aug. 3 meeting, when Ald. Thuy Pham-Remmele quizzed her husband, David Remmele, an accounting professor at UW-Whitewater. David Remmele had been raising concerns about the proposed public market when Mayor Dave Cieslewicz cut him off for being out of time.
Pham-Remmele kept her husband in the spotlight, beginning with an apparent dig at his salary: "I do trust your experience and expertise in teaching your business students to be more successful and wealthy than you are." Ouch.
David Remmele let this pass.
Note: This footage was captured from a RealMedia stream via the Madison City Channel website. This clip has been edited for length and compressed for online viewing.
