2011-01-14 Cost of Government Commission Minutes

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been done that way. That needs to change. And in our discussions in this committee, we’ve looked at things just totally out of the box. Some things we know we can’t even touch, but it doesn’t hurt to think about it. One of the things that we’ll be discussing later today in commission and we’ve discussed in our committee, is the boards and commissions. And we’ve talked about, might it be some of the boards and/or commissions consolidated? And I’ve sort ofdone a mock up on possibles. I know that they’re set up by Charter, but might they have less meetings than they do now? And the reason suggesting for that is that although the members are public citizens and it’s free, the staffing of these meetings are costly. As a councilman, how would you see consolidating boards and commissions and/or deleting boards and commissions? And/or deleting like this commission. Just as an example. MR. HOFFMANN: Well, I hadn’t thought of it until you mentioned it, the idea of consolidating commissions. Let me take it from that perspective. Energy and agriculture are two areas in which I think this county has done a deplorable job up to this point. I don’t know how else to put it. And I’ve been a persistent critic if you will, of how we address those two issues. Because in both of those areas, if we honestly had a very good vision of where we wanted to go, a small investment in time, effort and resources could, I think, save the county and the county residents a tremendous amount of money. And I think of this in the energy field. The idea of the Energy Advisory Commission and the Agricultural Advisory Commission, one of the purposes in my mind since I was the guy who was principally responsible to see those things become established, was to supplement the non-staff that the county has in both of these areas. I was hoping for a group of people in the energy field who, as volunteers, yes as citizens, what would be smart individuals who knew a hell of lot more about this task than I did and would be able to supplement a non-staff -we still have only one person on the county staff for energy I think at the moment, and we only have one person as I mentioned before in agriculture. Both of these commissions were supposed to supplement the lack of staffing that the county has in order to provide reasonable advice and assistance to the mayor. And at the same time provide the legislature or the council if you will, an opportunity to take a look at good ideas we can implement.In those areas where the commissions, as I see them being technical in nature, I couldn’t see them being consolidated with Planning Commission or Transportation or something like that. So, my perception and use, or how I would envision these commissions being used, and again I think it’s more of a philosophical thing. If I were in Mr. Kenoi’s seat for instance, I’d use the much more aggressively and with a very fixed policy and statement of how I want tosee the commissions react. And I would get feedback. And I would be, I think more aggressive in my use of that in that manner. It may not be possible in every instance, I understand, but I’m hard over on both energy and agriculture as two areas in which this county has not done its work well. And by the way, we have plans for both of those subjects. Both of them recommend the hiring of competent staff and people to do this job, three or four people, actually, not one. The other thing about commissions, believe it or not, is that you actually enhance participation of county government to a local resident. You might say, there’s not enough of those people. But quite frankly before I became a councilman I was on the Transportation Commission. It gave me an insight to a different approach to how things were done or not done depending on how you want to look at it. I was certainly encouraged because of my participation on that commission to seek public office, or one of the reasons. I’m not completely looking at it and never thinking of it in that vein before, Ms. Wong. I can’t give you a better answer 17