Mayor Harry Tutunjian questioned the validity of a special meeting held by the City Council Thursday that started more than an hour after its scheduled time.

According to a legal notice which appeared in The Record on April 21, the council planned to hold the meeting at 7 p.m. to make an appointment to fill the vacancy on the Board of Assessment Review and to override Tutunjian's veto of Local Laws 1 and 2 for 2009, which dealt with allowing both political parties on the council to hire their own legal counsel.

However, the special meeting did not actually begin until roughly 8:15 p.m. after the council's Finance Committee, which ran long because members had listened to a 30-minute presentation on reassessments from the state Office of Real Property Services.

Tutunjian said that the council was required to follow the schedule set forth in its legal notice - including both the time the meeting would start and the matters which would be discussed, since the override of his vetoes was actually moved to the council's regular May meeting.

"This appointment is null and void," said Tutunjian, who noted that the appointment was ever legally challenged it would not hold up in court.

Council President Clement Campana, D-At Large, said that that the council did the fair thing and was not in the wrong.

"I would never stop government from acting, regardless of what the clock says," said Campana, who said the complaint was typical of Tutunjian and his administration. "We weren't going to let these people speak, and as a courtesy, knowing full well that this thing wasn't ready to go forward, I let the guy speak."