2011-01-14 Cost of Government Commission Minutes

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right at the moment. I may need more study, or you may need to come back to me and show me the disadvantages and things, and maybe I’ll have a different perspective on it. MS. WONG: Okay. MS. O’HARA: Can I ask a question? The commission on agriculture is separate than the commission on energy? MR. HOFFMANN: Yes. You have two advisory commissions at the moment. MS. O’HARA: I just wanted to be clear on that. MR. HOFFMANN: Both of them were set up separately. I sponsored the legislation for both. The Agricultural Commission has been in effect for about a year and they’re working on the plan of a couple of things. They’re there, yes, and it is separate from the Energy Commission. MS. WONG: Another question. Mr. Yagong had sent a query out to the employees, I think it was a couple of years ago. It got a lot of responses MR. HOFFMANN: Last year I think. MS. WONG: What did the council do with that information when the report was shared, if anything? MR. HOFFMANN: Well, I can’t speak for other council members. I looked at it as a very good initial recap, summary of valid ideas from people inside the system and how they would look at changes from within. Not from the public perspective but from the individuals in the government. I was pleased. I thought it was good initiative. I recognized there’s political content and purpose. I mean almost every thing we do, I guess has that. Some of the responses were less than encouraging, or less than what I would want to see. But overall I thought it was a good idea. And if it was done consistently on a regular basis with maybe the survey indicating not just, what the heck do you feel down in the Mail Room for instance, but rather in a previous survey the general comments can be best summarized in three or four areas. What do you think about that now? What changes have been made? Have the council done anything? Have the administration done anything to address your concerns? Have there been some in-house issues? That would be interesting. I might also say we have an independent auditor’s office. We need to use them more than we have. And the origin of the performance based audits, I think was a good initiative. I’m happy to have tried to take that one off in the right direction when I was chair of council. We need to do more of that. MS. WONG: Essentially you’re saying the results of that query, council basically said, oh that’s interesting, and did nothing further than that? Cause it’s a one time information. 18