2010-07-30 Cost of Government Commission Minutes

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County services are. If you look at number 1 on the Cost of Government Commission when we set the commission up, if you look at the Charter, the section where it says Charter, number 1 talks about limiting expenditures to the lowest amount consistent with the efficient performance of essential services, activities, and functions. Unless we really define what they are, it’s hard to determine how we limit our expenditures, how we look at consolidating, overlapping services, and what services we really don’t need to get into. Number 4, it talks about abolishing services that are not necessary. And I think to get to number 4, we need to define what services are necessary – public safety, Public Works. How far do we go with health care? How far do we go into education? These are what we consider state functions. If the commission can come up with a real strong statement on what core County services are, that I think would be farther than any commission has every gone. What they’ve done is start from the middle rather than the beginning. I think the beginning is really identifying what the core services are. Then it makes our work at lot easier. MS. NICHOLSON: Okay, let’s open it up for general discussion and try to get some thoughts with those. Thank you very much for those thoughts on how we might proceed, because we need to just get running here right away since we only have 11 months. And as you saw in previous reports, there were always complaints about 11 months is not sufficient to cover this much ground, so we’ll get as far as we can. Suggestions on how we might proceed? MS. GARSON: So, we’re moving on to Agenda Item 9? MS. NICHOLSON: Yes. DISCUSSION/ACTION REGARDING APPROACH TO TAKE TO TIMELY ACCOMPLISH MANDATE OF THE COST OF GOVERNMENT COMMISSION Includes discussion/action on the methodology and sequence of analyzing the departments/boards/commissions to determine what information is needed and how to gain that information. MS. WONG: When we say 11 months, in fact shouldn’t we get something out before March 1, because March 1 is the first draft of the budget, so we should have some commentary to the Mayor before he is devising his budget. MS. NICHOLSON: We can certainly do that if we want. I’m not sure that any of the suggestions that have been previously made have been taken terribly seriously. Hopefully we will. So we can set a deadline for ourselves before that to get something, a draft out. MS. WONG: I was trying to look at when the previous commissions sent in their report, and I see one is in February. I didn’t get as far as to look at when the other one was done. MS. NICHOLSON: I think those were because of when the first meetings were held. We’re starting late, quite a bit later than we should have been. I believe that we were supposed to start January 1. 14