2010-11-17 Cost of Government Commission Minutes

Home

LEONARD: Okay. Okay, my fifth suggestion is to County Code review /update schedule. Currently we have no process that is clearly established to review code changes. When I go into the Planning Department and I say okay, we have some changes that we need to make to the code, is there a specific schedule in which we have within the Planning Department that by this date, we are to make our recommended changes to the council for consideration? And the council has this specific time period schedule to review, schedule those recommended changes, and either give it a thumbs up or a thumbs down on it, and then it gets implemented into the County Charter or County Code. We don't have any process like that. When Igo in - -we have a folder in the Planning Department when I go in that folder to see recommended changes, it goes back ten years. We have changes that people have been making for decades that we should be they should be done. But we have no process to encourage people to make those changes. If we did that, there's a long -term cost benefit, because we're not dealing with archaic codes, or people are doing things that they think are correct, but the code is ambiguous. So we have a lot of lessons learned in our community. Let's apply those to the appropriate code changes and then have a schedule where we make our recommendations by a specific date, get it to the council, and have them review those changes and either approve or disapprove. If they disapprove some of my changes, I get their comments back, and I get into the cycle the following year, and then in two or three years we've got some pretty cleaned up codes. Right now, the only time it happens is if something seriously occurs and then somebody says well, we've got to change that code. So it's one at a time. It's kind of a penny ante approach. We don't want to do that. So I recommend that the county look at seriously setting up some sort of schedule demanding that the departments implement write their recommended code changes, submit them to the council for review, and then the council has a period of time to review those and either pass or fail them. CHAIR: Do most current changes to the County Code, are those instigated by County Council members? LEONARD: Sometimes they are, butt mean there have been changes in which we've made out of the Planning Department, again, piecemeal, that we work through Corporation Counsel and then they present it to the council members and then council will rule on it. Okay, recommendation 6 is in regards to changing the way in which we right now we appoint deputy directors as well as our director positions. I think we lose a tremendous amount of continuity in the county by having the two top positions in our departments appointed. My recommendation is that the deputy director position should be a permanent, civil service position to ensure continuity, but more importantly to put somebody in the position of being responsible for the organization, and directing the affairs of the organization. My personal observation is that I see some of these positions, because they are political, not really doing the work at hand of directing the departments towards their mission, their vision, their goals we don't even have that in our department so deputy directors are valuable from that standpoint of putting somebody at the helm and controlling what's going on in the departments. So that's kind of a political hot potato that I think could be juggled, but I think there's tremendous value there to consider. Any questions? 13