For the first time in nearly half a century, the Palo Alto City Council will emerge from the November election with fewer members than it had to go in, thanks to the voters' decision four years ago to reduce the number of seats from nine to seven.

Now, city officials are preparing to revise other council policies to accommodate the slimmer council, a process that is sure to extend to well into next year. This includes changing the size of the council's two standing committees, revising the rules for proposing new laws through a "colleagues memo" and adopting new provisions pertaining to how much time people should be allowed to speak at council meetings.

For the nine members of the current council, the process began on Monday night, when they officially adopted two changes, one to the municipal code and another to its own procedures. The former reduced the number of seats on the council's two standing committees — the Finance Committee and the Policy and Service Committee — from four to three. The latter reduces the maximum number of council members who can sign on to a colleagues memo from four to three, though the City Attorney's Office believes two would be a safer choice.

Both changes are required for the council to comply with the Brown Act, which bars a council majority from conferring on an item before it goes up for a public hearing in front of the full council.

While the council had little choice but to adopt these revisions, other changes under consideration are far more debatable. Some, in fact, directly pertains to council debates.

Among the changes that the council plans to consider is how many members it should take to remove an item from the council's "consent" calendar, which includes a list of generally non-controversial items that all get approved with a single vote and no debate. Currently, it takes three council members to remove most items from consent and hold a full discussion on them. Councilwoman Karen Holman suggested Monday that the number should be reduced to two when the new council takes charge.

In arguing for the change, Holman said that requiring three members to remove an item makes sense under the present setup when the trio make up a third of the council. Once the size shrinks to seven members, this requirement would require nearly half of the council to agree to remove an item from the consent calendar.

"I think the threshold is remarkably high," Holman said.

Holman proposed on Monday changing the threshold then and there, though her suggestion failed by a 4-4 vote, with council members Tom DuBois, Lydia Kou and Greg Tanaka joining her and Councilman Cory Wolbach abstaining. The rest of the council agreed that the policy should be hashed out by the Policy and Services Committee as part of a broader process of reforming the council's procedures and protocols.

Councilman Adrian Fine, who serves on the committee along with DuBois, Holman and Wolbach, argued against lowering the threshold and noted that making it easy to pull items from the consent pushes other, more important, items further toward the bottom of the agenda. At the end of the day, he noted, the council usually ends up adopting the "consent" items anyway, it just takes far longer.

Fine also suggested that the council should be looking at how much time people should be allowed to speak at meetings. This includes not just members of the public, who usually get three minutes each to make their case to the council, but council members themselves.

"I think it's important for us to be brief and concise in our comments," Fine said.

The idea of limiting council members' speaking time is far from new. Various council members had proposed the idea over the years, only to see it instantly fizzle. By contrast, mayors have not shied away over the past two years from reducing the public's speaking time to one or two minutes per speaker.

Winter Dellenbach, a Barron Park resident and government watchdog, urged Mayor Liz Kniss on Monday night not to reduce the public's speaking time, a habit that she characterized as an affront to democracy.

"I feel it's demeaning and I feel it's disrespectful," Dellenbach said. "For newer people, it's bewildering to them. When we have to speak quickly and feel like we're running out of time because we feel you can't understand us, we sound stupid and we're not stupid."

The council discussion was prompted by Measure D, which voters passed in November 2014 and which was designed to kick in as soon as all the council members who were on the council at that time termed out.

While Holman, as a member of the Policy and Services Committee, will take part in developing the new council procedures, her role will be necessarily limited. Her seat, along with that of Councilman Greg Scharff, will disappear at the end of the year when both term out.

The Palo Alto council last saw a seat reduction in 1972, when the number of council members dropped from 15 to nine.