Pardon us if we sound pretty predictable on this one.

The Bainbridge Island City Council has decided to change the way it holds its workstudy sessions — and we don’t like it.

Twice a month, the council meets for a study session, and twice each month, it meets for a business meeting to give final approval on paying bills, as well as taking votes on resolutions and ordinances.

But now, with a newly seated council with three fresh members, Mayor Kol Medina (a council veteran) has come up with the idea that the council should no longer take public comment at its two study sessions each month.

Supposedly, it’s so the council can have more time talking about agenda items and those meetings can be held more effectively and in a shorter amount of time.

Council members, apparently, have been a bit fatigued by the long length of council meetings already this year. Three of the first meetings in January ran for more than four hours, and the last two have been roughly three hours in length.

Sorry, but we’re not sympathetic.

Those early meetings ran long largely because of a full agenda and, frankly, the inability of those running the meetings (we’re looking at you, Mayor/Councilman Medina, and Deputy Mayor Sarah Blossom) to manage the meeting agenda and to keep the debate on the dais moving along.

Silencing the public is not the right way to make some meetings end earlier. Ending public comment at workstudy sessions cuts in half the number of opportunities each month where islanders can address the council as a whole, and members of the public are already cut off abruptly at the three-minute mark when they do have input to offer.

If the council is looking for shorter meetings, we’d suggest that some of the presentations to the council be cut in half, and that council members come better prepared to meetings so they don’t waste time asking questions that could have been easily answered by a review of the materials in their agenda packet.

The council should consider what the city’s governance manual, adopted by previous councils, suggests: “Communication with (the) public is more interactive in study sessions than in business meetings. Typically, public comments on any topic relating to city business will be taken at the outset of business meetings, whereas in study sessions public comments are taken in the course of consideration of each matter under study at the meeting.”

Council: Please let the “public” continue to be a part of your “public meetings.”