2010-07-30 Cost of Government Commission Minutes

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MS. WONG: And Office of Aging’s grants would be in there as well? MS. SAKO: Also in General Fund, yes. So, they are actually the first one like programs for the aged was like $1.4 million. And they have several from the state as well. We actually have several grants and now with the stimulus act and the RRA there’s actually even more federal grants. MS. WONG: And when grants are written, is it written through Finance or is written through the department? MS. SAKO: Each department is responsible for writing out their own grant applications. We just help them with the accounting and making sure it gets carried forward to the next year if appropriate. MS. WONG: Thank you. MS. SAKO: We do stick on them to make sure they’re supposed to be doing the recording and we try to help them as much as we can. But ultimately the department is responsible for carrying out the grant and all the related reporting. MS. NICHOLSON: Any other questions? We will have a chance of course if we choose, to further investigate the Finance Department, so we can ask more specific questions then, but do we have any other general questions now? Okay thank you very much. Thank you very much. Now if you don’t mind, we’re going to go to, actually it’s what’s up there on the screen right now – we’re going to skip Item 6, and we’re going to go to 7. We want to try to knock off the things that are not procedural so that some of the guests might be able to leave, then we can get into our more procedurals. So, if there are no objections we would like to go now to item 7, followed by item 9, and then we’ll go back and pick things up in order. Any objections to that change in the agenda? None. PRESENTATION REGARDING DUTIES OF COST OF GOVERNMENT COMMISSION AND APPROACH TAKEN BY PREVIOUS COST OF GOVERNMENT COMMISSION (by the Office of the Corporation Counsel) MS. GARSON: I thought you might want an introduction to basically why you are here, and what do you need to do, and how long do you have to do it. What I have up in the screen is the duties of the Cost of Government. This comes straight from the Charter. We put this in your binder so you have this Charter provision in your binder, but what the Cost of Government Commission is supposed to do is study and investigate the organizations and methods of operations of all departments, commissions, boards, offices and other instrumentalities of all branches of the County government and determine what changes if any may be desirable to accomplish the policies set forth therein. And that is contained in the County Charter under the Cost of Government. 11