2000-02-09 Charter Commission Minutes

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minutes 02-09-00Page 3 of 41 opportunity to speak before you today. I’m sorry I haven’t been here more frequently, but fortunately today my schedule permitted me to come here. I’d like to begin by thanking you again for all your hard work. I know you’ve been meeting a lot, especially on the weekends. And I want to thank you for it. I hope that my absence has not been indicative of the public’s absence, especially on your weekend meetings, because I know these are all well intended and you’ve obviously done a lot of work. So I want to thank you very much for your work. Second, I’d like to thank you for what I saw in this morning’s paper about considering an Environmental Services Department, especially as it relates, not to just the environment, but as it relates to solid waste and wastewater. I think this makes a lot of sense. Commissioner Irvine had called me regarding this and I hope some of the materials we were able to provide you were helpful. I think this makes a lot of sense. I don’t know all the details. I pretty much know what I read in the paper this morning, and I want to thank you for giving this consideration. I think it makes a lot of sense. I’d like to just go down your Unfinished Business list and make very brief comments on each one of these, and my comments will be based on a minimal amount of information that I have on these agenda items, but, I’ll make some comments. Mr. Chairman, do I understand that the Department of Public Safety is something that may be considered in lieu of the Police and Fire Commission, or is this in addition to? RAY: That was something we were considering. Just to give you a status. We made a lot of progress in terms of wrapping up our preliminary recommendations at our last Saturday meeting. So we’re really just a couple of items shy of having pretty much stated and formulated a preliminary set of recommendations, so other than one or two of these items, we’ve already taken preliminary votes and decided whether we’re going to recommend these initially. And what that means is that we’ll come up with a set of preliminary recommendations with brief description about them, and we’ll go out for a set of public hearings that will start on March 11th and will go four Saturdays in a row. So over the next couple of months, we’ll be taking input from the public and the County on all these items that we put out on a preliminary basis. After that couple of months, and during that time, we’ll finalize our recommendations and, hopefully, wrap things up around June. TYLER: So the Department of Public Safety would be in lieu of - RAY: That’s what it would be. I can tell you that we’ve - TYLER: No? RAY: The Department of Public Safety - TYLER: Is in addition to. RAY: Would be a department that would encompass Police, Fire - TYLER: I see. HERKES: But not in place of a Commission RAY: Oh, a Commission. Excuse me. TYLER: Okay. RAY: Anyway, we’ve decided not to pursue that so you don’t have worry about that one. TYLER: Oh, okay. RAY: Let me just run you down. We are recommending a Fire Commission. We are not recommending changes to the Police Commission. We anticipate recommending some changes in regard to the - TYLER: Managing Director. Yes, I read about that. file://\\coh01\cohweb\council\charter_commission\minutes\minutes 02-09-00.html7/1/2011