1999-08-25 Charter Commission Minutes (2)

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minutes 8-25-99Page 38 of 60 HERKES: Off the agenda? RAY: No. It’s an agenda item on the Special Election. Because I think this has so much to do with the course we set in the timing. This sort of represents a cloud over our head in terms of just driving the activity of the Commission so I want to get some sort of sense of what the group feels about this because, in my mind, just logistically, if we are going to consider a Special Election, we need to really pick up the pace here. I think we’re going to have to start meeting all days some Saturdays and really juice this process up because at the last meeting we talked about two meetings a month, second and fourth Wednesdays, and that’s just one meeting in our rules so we’d have a 5:00 meeting on one Wednesday and possibly an earlier meeting. But anyway, under that scenario, I think we’re talking about several months to finish our review of the Charter and then once we do that, going at least on one round of public hearings for input around the island, and possibly some of those meetings during that several months, we can hold those around the island or somewhat, but anyway then, we’ve got another month or so of public review and input, and then coming up with our final Amendments. So, something just doesn’t jive in my mind. If we’re going to think about a Special Election then we’ve really got to pick up the pace or else let’s just decide we’re not and just go ahead on this course. I just want to open that up for discussion because I’m just not comfortable with the idea of a Special Election hanging out there and we’re not moving in a time frame that’s going to accommodate a Special Election. If we want to consider a Special Election and really pick up the pace here, we should decide that so I’m going to open that for discussion. Because right now, in my mind, we’re looking at two meetings a month and kind of moving through this thing on that basis. So like I say, I don’t see us finishing this thing for several months before we go out for the public review. IRVINE: John, I don’t mind saying right now that I’m going to vote against having a Special Election. I just can’t see, at this point, any justification. We’ve had testimony against. We know that people don’t vote in Special Elections in nearly the numbers that they do in a General Election, and I think it would be unfair to the people and ourselves to try to stage an election prior to the next General Election so that’s my position. RAY: John. SANTANGELO: My position is that a couple of things came up. One was City Manager which could hugely impact government and nonpartisan. The City Manager is something, in my mind, that can be taken up by the Council. It’s a policy type thing. We can deal with it here so it’s not like overwhelming and pressing to me. Nonpartisan can be voted on in the next election and take effect the election after. It changes it but it’s not something that I want to rush into so I haven’t seen anything here that’s been proposed that I feel like needs to incur this kind of involvement of people and processes and money, so I have to agree with Sue, maybe for different reasons, but I certainly agree with Ms. Irvine. RAY: Other comments? HERKES: Yes. The reason I laid out that time line was to get something going, but I’m not ready to vote on the time line yet because I want that to get in everybody’s hands and everybody’d have a chance to look at it, whether we can do this. Now whether it’s a good idea or not, I’m still not ready to vote. There are some issues that I think could be dealt with better. It’s a major restructuring. As Chris says, we’ve got to rewrite the Charter. I don’t want to present a new Charter to an electorate in an election year. I want to present a new Charter as a stand alone but I haven’t decided whether to do a new Charter yet. In my mind, I haven’t decided whether I want to vote for that or not yet, so there’s some issues that are not file://\\coh01\cohweb\council\charter_commission\minutes\minutes 8-25-99.html7/1/2011