2010-07-30 Cost of Government Commission Minutes

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MS. NICHOLSON: So, what I’m hearing is there’s maybe sort of two and maybe even more than two approaches on the table. One could be to go directly to the departments, the commissions, basically what the approach was taken last time, and ask them how they feel they might experience some savings or cost cuttings or ideas. Or to take a larger more global approach is look over all of the county and first focus on what really the county should be doing and maybe do some prioritization of those kinds of things. Is that what I’m hearing? MS. O’HARA: I think so. I think you’re on track with those two approaches. I think they can be done simultaneously. I don’t think it’s one or the other. It sounds like what we need to begin with given those suggestions about defining what are the essential core services that this county is focused on would be to do a review of the County Charter and perhaps the code that list the agencies that had been created, and extrapolate from that what we perceive is what the county is going to intend in those services. So what are the core essential services, prioritizing them would be really good in terms of further evaluating savings to government. I think we’re still going to have to go through a department review to what extent we want to do that. Do we want to limit the number of departments or how we want to approach that is up to the commission. But I think we’re still going to have to do some focus on departments, perhaps take a look at those that are fully funded by General Fund, look at those that have some revenue sources that are partially or fully funded independent from the General Fund. How we want to prioritize what departments we look at is something that we should probably decide as well. But, I also note, I saw this letter to the employees and I was wondering did they get any feedback that last commission that sent this out as a broadcast Notice to all Employees? And what is that feedback incorporated in the commission’s work. MS. NICHOLSON: There was not a whole lot of feedback from individual employees. It varied with department, from department to department because I think the encouragement came from their supervisors to what extent that they should participate. And I would say some departments were more open to that than others. MS. PROVALENKO: Yes, exactly what I remembered. But we really didn’t get a lot of feedback from the employees within the department. It generally just came back with the supervisor. MR. ARMOUR: Was there much feedback from the supervisors? Because I glanced through this and there was a lot that said no recommendations and was that just that a summary of what they said? MS. NICHOLSON: It was that the department, if we had someone appear before us, the department’s supervisor, whoever it was who represented the department be it the director, the deputy director, in some cases gave us an overview of how the department works. But we didn’t really come up with any suggestions from them. So, it wasn’t that they didn’t respond, but that we just didn’t see any place we could really go, and we wanted to spend time on the ones we felt we could use our time. 20