2011-01-28 Cost of Government Commission Minutes

Home

it if you were in the position of receiving this, how it’s most useable and approachable for you if you were, say, on the council or you were the mayor,so you would take it seriously. And I do like your suggestion, Gloria, of having some key topics or key summaries that we have and then try to organize things underneath them. MS. WONG: I’d also like to bring it back to the original topic that Bill said at the first meeting of the essential functions of the County government, to pull that in. I think we established that early on or at least spoke to it. MS. NICHOLSON: But I’m not sure that we actually did establish it, and I don’t know that that is reflected in what we have in front of us at the moment. We haven’t really articulated, I don’t think, those key functions of government. MS. WONG: I think the report that our committee submitted listed the eight in the areas that were not addressed and that’s why I keep reminding about health care and education, the ones that we’re not addressing. MS. NICHOLSON: Where on your report? Where is that? MS. WONG: I’m thinking that I might have just spoken it and not written it out. But I remember e-mailing. So I don’t remember who I e-mailed it to, and I apologize. I can bring that summary that I have in my notes at home to validate the functions. MS. NICHOLSON: If that’s our tack, I think we all need to see it and agree that we feel those are the key functions of government. Cause that would be a good introduction. MS. PROVALENKO: It seems like a good start for us. MS. NICHOLSON: So can you get those and back them up in the next agenda so we can have that as a report that we can then discuss and agree on it. MS. WONG: Okay. MS. NICHOLSON: Okay. So how would you like to address providing a little bit more background or justification or explanation for some of these? We don’t need to do all of them. We can start through the list and do some of them today. We can do some of them at each meeting. And I think quite a few of them we don’t need to actually add any explanation to. I’m sure no one really wants to volunteer to take it on as a task. MS. GARSON: Would you want to turn your topics into broad recommendations and then choose some things under it? Actually Reimbursement/per diem –so that, is the recommendation like to reduce reimbursements and per diem payments? And underneath that have –Eliminate meal reimbursement, replace set per diem. It’s your topic heading that’s sort of a broad recommendation and then some things to accomplish that as a recommendation. MR. ARMOUR: I think that’s a good idea. 20