1999-06-16 Charter Commission Minutes

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Page 5 of 11 PRANKE: Well, I’ll write them out because they’re a little more complicated and a little more - But the second thing concerns the Board of Ethics. If you look in the County Charter under the Section 14-5 Board of Ethics , there is no place designated for the Board of Ethics to be placed in this county. Unlike any other board or commission which has a specific place, it goes under the Mayor’s Office, etc., the Board of Ethics has never been placed anywhere. I urge you to put forth, to allow the voters to vote to put that Board of Ethics under the County Prosecutor’s Office. As currently, five members of the Board of Ethics are appointed by the Mayor, approved by the Council and then those members sit in judgment with the Corporation Counsel giving them legal advice and the Corporation Counsel sending legal advice for any county member who comes before that board, you got the same law firm on both sides of the issue, talking about, fighting, whoever the citizen is who says hey, I think there’s something wrong here and it’s no wonder that in the past ten years, there’s been one case where a person was found to be in some violation of the Code of Ethics. Maybe we are just that good in this county but I don’t think so . I would urge you to put the Board of Ethics under the Prosecutor’s Office or to allow us to vote to do so and two, to change the way the Board of Ethics is chosen. The Board of Ethics should be, there should be a nine member panel. This year the Board of Ethics has failed to meet three times out of six. I believe that’s correct and I keep getting these things that say the Board of Ethics meeting has been canceled because they couldn’t get a quorum of five people. I suggest we have a nine member Board of Ethics and that each member of the district, the person who’s elected to the council in that district shall appoint that member with the entire council approving or disapproving of that member going on the board. That takes this out from under one person, the Mayor really making all the appointments. It’s true that the County Council can deny somebody but that seldom happens. The Board of Ethics should be appointed by each member of the County Council from that district and they may never appoint somebody because they may not be in office when such a vacancy comes but when a vacancy comes in that district, then whoever is serving at that time in that district should appoint that person. Okay, that’s essentially what I had to say. The two things, the County Code - RAY: Okay, any questions for Mr. Pranke? IRVINE: Yes, I do have a question. RAY: Ms. Irvine. IRVINE: Concerning the Sunshine in our Charter here. Is what you wanted us to do was take out that it would happen at the request of an individual involved that we would have an executive session? PRANKE: Yes, that’s totally wrong. They can say I would like to go into executive session but then the board needs to meet but that’s not the way it’s written and most boards have taken it to say okay, the County Charter is what we go by, not the Sunshine Law but the Sunshine Law is a law of general applicability. It applies to all states, all state agencies, all county agencies that hold regular meetings. IRVINE: It sounded to me though, like you were complaining about the way that these commissions here ran their meetings because they’re not really in compliance with the Charter as it is now. You know what I mean? PRANKE: Well, that may be too. Yes, that may be too. I find it very difficult to swallow sometime when we go there and they go into executive session based simply on the fact that somebody asked. That may also be a violation of the County Charter too, but certainly just going in on the request of somebody. They say I would like to go into executive session. There’s a whole lot of paper here but in essence, in one of these executive minutes, the person asking for the executive, or in the general minutes, the person asking for the executive session says he asked Rudy, meaning Rudy Legaspi in this case, told me to ask for it and so that’s what I want to do. They had no reason for it, I mean there was no file://\\coh01\cohweb\council\charter_commission\minutes\minutes 6-16-99.html7/1/2011