2010-09-10 Cost of Government Commission Minutes

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cause someone chewed out my ear last week, you folks create commissions for what? To spend more money and then you’re going to talk about stop spending money? So, I guess I wanted to see if our commission is really necessary? Will we have an impact? Will there be changes? Or was it something that someone just put together and it was voted upon? Why was this commission really started? MR. TAKABA: The Charter says MS. WONG: Yeah, but why was it put in the Charter? In my mind the mayor is the executive of the county. He should be the leader. He should be managing and directing. What we’re doing is trying to help manage and direct when you look from the outside. I like the idea. I just don’t know if it’s executable and of value. MR. TAKABA: It looks like there was an ordinance passed by the Council to put something like this on the Charter. And the public voted in 1998. M. NICHOLSON: I just remembered there was a lot of pilikia, there were a lot of complaints, and so it became an initiative to the ballot. I can’t remember what it was about, but I guess in the past, I don’t think it’s been taken seriously. I would hope that this time it might be taken a little bit more seriously. MS. O’HARA: I think, I mean we can make the assumption whether it was serious or not, there’s been a lot of issues that have prevented implementation of recommendations in the last three years, i.e., the economy. And so, I think it would be great if we, we’ve already asked the departments for an initial response to our five questions, but in the last report, which was January ’07, the commission made some very specific recommendations to certain departments. Perhaps we should send those out to those departments and ask, were these implemented and if not why not? Was it a budgetary problem? Was it the lack of funding? Or was this recommendation simply did not make sense to them? It wasn’t useful. I think it would be great to have that feedback because it would just improve our product in the end. Let’s not make recommendations that are not doable at the department levels. So maybe we could that. I don’t think every department received recommendations. Looking through the report, focus on six departments, Data Systems, Environmental Management, Public Works. And so the ones that are specifically identified and have recommendations, let’s write a letter asking what’s the status on the recommendations. MS. PROVALENKO: I think it strengthens our case too, in the sense that this is going to be the third commission like this. And the first one probably weren’t really sure, didn’t take it really seriously. Second one okay. And now we’re following up on the second one. And I think it adds a lot more credibility. More strength to it. MS. WONG: And accountability. MS. NICHOLSON: And is that something that you can handle for us? And what kind of deadline would we like these responses back? Give them 30 days? MS. WONG: Can we get it by our next meeting? 29