1999-07-21 Charter Commission Minutes

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Page 7 of 11 likelihood that the Board or Commission could move forward with its business. The appointment by Council District would more closely mirror the change from the Council people being elected at large to being elected by District which is what we have now. The Mayor, of course, would elect the Chairperson and the Chairperson would, as by Roberts Rules, vote to either make or break a tie. Moving on to the Department of Taxation idea and itemization. I think the answer to your question is "not exactly." The property owner would simply know the amount of money that he paid into roads county wide or solid waste county wide and I think that probably to ask them to break it out too much more than that would probably be cumbersome at this point. But you’d certainly want to know, and of course at that point, you could find out from your Council person if you were interested, how much money that department, the Road Department, spent in your district from that point on. You’d be able to break it down pretty well. And of course, when things like sewer bonding shows up on your tax bill, you know that your district doesn’t have any. The other thing is that I think that there has been some talk about having a special election to move this process along and I don’t think, economically, that makes any sense or in terms of input from the public. I think that this process is going to take a little time. And as a question of information, the input that is going to this body now, is that going to be summarized somewhere? And then there’s going to be what, yet another round of meetings to have discussion about that input? HIGASHI: Yes. OLSON: Yes, so I guess from a practical sense, there isn’t going to be time for a special election anyway. Thank you. HIGASHI: Ginny was talking about Managing Director. OLSON: Yes, but I mean, what you are saying then is that you would like to see that particular issue, or all of the issues, go to a special election? That’s the question. HIGASHI: My question is (undiscernible) person to the public, if you support a Managing Director, would you want to wait four years until this election is over and then go to a Managing Director form of government? OLSON: To save the County some numbers of hundreds of thousands of dollars, yes. That makes sense. I mean, not only that, but I think that if you determine that a Managing Director system is what you want, getting the logistics of that, the criteria for the position. You know there’s just a whole lot of things involved there that is not simply going to spring magically into place just because you changed the law and you no longer have a Mayor. I mean that’s a process that’s going to have to be worked out. Quite frankly, I’m not even certain that I’m all that - I mean, look what happened to Orange County. The Managing Director took all of the money and put it into junk bonds and they all went bankrupt so I don’t think we really want to be rushing down that road. It just may not have a good end. I think we want to look at it and have a discussion process. And people will have time to consider it between now and the next election. If they elect a Mayor and then we’ve got four years to work out the details and I think that’s plenty quickly enough if we’re going to make that major a change in the way we do business. HIGASHI: Okay. MARTIN: I have a question, if I may. You made mention about an alternate. Correct me if I’m wrong. You said you wanted to see the number go to 10 and with one alternate or with 10 alternates? file://\\coh01\cohweb\council\charter_commission\minutes\minutes 7-21-99.html7/1/2011