2000-03-08 Charter Commission Minutes

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minutes 03-08-00Page 25 of 35 RAY: Moving on. Holdover Boards and Commissions. That’s pretty simple. It’s going from 30 to 90 days. IRVINE: I was wondering on that, John, a couple of people testified to us, the Board of Appeals maybe, and maybe somebody else, something about clarifying that Boards and Commission members should start on January 1st. Was that something that we could toss out along with that? I have it here. From the Board of Appeals, and I think the Planning Commission also said the same thing to us. ‘Any vacancy occurring in any Board or Commission shall be filled for the unexpired term plus a term of five years’ is what it says now. ‘This section should further be amended to state that terms shall begin on January 1st of the year of appointment.’ I don’t know exactly why that was there, but I do know that we heard it from Janet Fujioka and from, I think, the Planning Commission. Does anybody have any clue? I mean, I’ve got her letter here, but - YUEN: Let me look into that. I’ll just make a note to look into that because I don’t remember what the issue was. RAY: So we’ll follow up on that. Safety Coordinator. HERKES: Have you heard from him? RAY: I saw him today, and he told me he was going to come in and say something. He’s been saying that for nine months now. We’ll see. YOSHIYAMA: I have a question on Safety Coordinator. So, this proposal just moves over two functions, rather than what did we have, (a) to (e), or (a) to (f)? And so that’s very clear. In our discussions, was it that it was redundant; the inspection of buildings and -? YUEN: I think that the general discussion was that really the Safety Coordinator had, for a number of years, been confined to Workers Compensation and was not doing all these other things, and that most of these things are being done by people in the County, so I wrote this up so only move over the Work Comp function to Civil Service, and figured that somebody else was doing all these other things, like inspecting County equipment, buildings and facilities. I would expect somebody within the Department of Public Works is supposed to do that. ‘Review operating practices’. I think the agencies do that themselves. "Investigate accidents’. For personnel-type accidents, it’s a Workers Comp function. When it involves the general public, Corp Counsel has an investigator where they think there’s going to be a liability claim. The rest is a Work Comp. YOSHIYAMA: Okay. Thanks. RAY: Number 11. Qualifications of Heads of Departments of Public Works and Water Supply. HIGASHI: Can we revisit that Safety Coordinator? HERKES: Yes. RAY: Right now? HIGASHI: Yes, please. RAY: Sure. HIGASHI: Does it become a Civil Service position? What’s the intent here? Is it an exempt position? YUEN: It would become Civil Service, yes. Actually, though, the way I’ve written it up, the Safety Coordinator, that position is abolished and if they want to create the equivalent position, it would be established as a Civil Service position. What I’m saying is that the Safety Coordinator right now is an appointed position. The language here would abolish that as an appointed position and transfer all the positions, which are now in the office, to the Department of Civil Service. It keeps those in existence, but if this is passed, the way I have done it here, you are short one person, the Safety Coordinator. We can write it differently so that it’s a position, not the person. What I’m saying is that you could create it so that you don’t lose that position. The position is transferred to Civil Service and becomes a Civil Service position, but you can’t put the existing person in that position. That would have to be done through Civil Service rules file://\\coh01\cohweb\council\charter_commission\minutes\minutes 03-08-00.html7/1/2011