2010-09-10 Cost of Government Commission Minutes

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M. NICHOLSON: So are you involved with the purchase of equipment for the county so that people don’t have quite so many say personal printers so that things are sent to a network? Are you involved in that aspect too or is that another effort? MR. FROST: The procurement policy will be involved and we’re looking at that because there is a procurement policy for buying a vehicle or a certain policies for materials. Again, that’s hopefully as we get early successes and we’ll build on that to expand into other areas. We’re not really looking at procurement policies, looking at everything – all materials which would be quite a task. MS. NICHOLSON: The Cost of Government Commission has, I would say, a broader mandate than you have but definitely includes your mandate. And I would say that we could enhance your efforts and you can enhance ours by working together because we will be putting together a report that will have recommendations to the mayor that will also go to the County Council that can include some of your items. So, we would definitely like to have the information you have gathered so that we can null it over and decide if we want to include it in our report also. We would definitely like to be working with you. MR. FROST: Okay. Thank you. MS. NICHOLSON: Are there any other comments? Thank you very much for coming and making the presentation and please stay in touch with us. DISCUSSION REGARDING IDENTIFICATION OF CORE COUNTY RESPONSIBILITIES MS. NICHOLSON: Okay we are on Item 6 of our agenda – discussion regarding identification of core county responsibilities. I’d like to really thank Gloria for doing some research for us. Hopefully everyone’s had a chance to look at this. Gloria, why don’t you just talk about what you did, how you got here, what some of your conclusions are. MS. WONG: I think it was very well noted that this was key for our committee to define the core responsibility for services. So I Googled, dog pile, whatever search engines, and I was really looking for white paper concepts. But as I was searching I’ve seen that a lot of states experiencing what we’re experiencing. We’re making statements about how they had to reform the counties and we really look at their core services and what budget items needed to be cut, consolidated, just as we’re trying to do here. So, I probably looked at 30 states and various different newspapers and I kept all of the bulk of the research but I tried to hone it down to three pages was the least as I could get. To help us to look at what our county has and to compare it to what other states and philosophers and educators have indicated as services under those departments.I think what I was trying to look for what cannot be touched we have to have those. And what are things that are changing. One of the things that I really noted and I couldn’t really put it in here was that different states and counties were saying that although there has been a standard, because of the economic changes, they have had to change departments and change the way they look at. So, I think that gives us a certain leeway to make recommendations if we want to say, although it’s been done this way before, maybe this way will work for this period of time during economic hardship. So, these 11