2000-03-25 Charter Commission Minutes

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minutes 03-25-00Page 27 of 34 community, but a rapidly changing, diverse community needs a strong leader. Otherwise, it ends up in basically racist bickering, and geographic bickering, in which nothing gets done and the manager becomes entirely ineffective. A couple of specific points on some of your - The Legislative Research Office. I wasn’t clear whether you said you were going to leave that - Exactly what the changes - But my only concern here, it says a Director and staff appointed by the Council, but the Director would recommend all personnel actions to the Council. I’m not real clear as to what that means, and I know that it’s very vague as to how it actually works now. But if that means that only people get appointed if the Legislative Auditor okays it, this is a very bad idea, because that means that the majority gets to pick all the Legislative staff, which means that anybody who opposes the majority, who wants to see change or reform, can’t get Legislative staff that’s going to support them. You basically have your opponents doing your research for you. That’s a terrible idea. Right now it’s sort of undefined, and when I was there, they pulled it both ways and there was a big struggle over exactly how it was supposed to be done. But better to have it that way than to give the majority the ability to pick everyone who does the legislative research because that means no outside, or reform, or other perspective legislation is going to get done. It’ll come to a complete halt. And I know because I was in that position. The Legislative Auditor tried to shut down the research I was doing repeatedly and, fortunately, it was undefined so she couldn’t stop it. But there was a very strong attempt to prevent a lot of good research, which the Council later passed some of the legislation like the Native Forest Bill, that came out of this research. There never would have been a Native Forest Bill if the rules had been clearer, so I’m just saying that I’m not sure what the intent is here but keep that in mind. Planning Commission. I would like to chime in with everyone else. I see absolutely no justification for the Planning Commission being anything other than advisory. They don’t have the professional skills. They don’t have any of the professional expertise to make these decisions. Commissions should be for unqualified, unprofessional people to come in and comment on what the professionals are doing. The problem we have, and 90% of the problems in County government now, are the result of an Administration which is utterly failing to do its job. So everything that the Administration is supposed to be doing, and no one’s forcing them, there are no requirements in terms of Heads of Departments, none of this sort of stuff. They’re simply allowed to muck along and do whatever their political agenda of the moment drives them to do. So the real work that the Administration is supposed to be doing, like planning, that’s what they’re supposed to be doing. They’re supposed to have, I think, a dozen professional planners, with degrees, working, coordinating all of the different needs of the island, and coming up with rational solutions. They don’t have any. They don’t have any degree’d certified planners in the Planning Department. When the Planning Department doesn’t do its job then it shoves it off on the Council. The Council’s supposed to be writing legislation, not administering day-to-day pork, or all the sorts of things they often end up doing because the Administration’s not doing its job. Then the Council, who’s only there two years, says, hell, I don’t know what the hell’s going on here. I just got here. So then they pass off their authority back to the Administration who gives it to Planning Commissioners who are appointed by the Mayor, and in the end are going to do what the Mayor wants. He’s going to pick people who do what he wants. They then essentially write law and no one’s accountable. I mean it’s been passed around and around and around until the public has no say in it, and it’s not accountable. And it all started because the Administration’s not doing its job. And the way to stop that is to require professional standards for all departments, including the Managing Director who has the responsibility for the overall managing, like a CEO, but is then held accountable to the Mayor who is elected island-wide. Because otherwise they’re not accountable to anyone. Lastly, and I know it’s way too late in the process, but there are two basic amendments that would accomplish, or at least create the general direction of change that I think everybody wants, that aren’t mentioned here, and should be. And they’re both based on the general idea that you want to actually - Instead of trying to regulate your way out of a problem, which is what a lot of these are. I mean, you’re basically taking problems of democracy, choice; we don’t like the people, or Mayor, or whatever else, and you’re trying to fix them with rules which, anybody who’s been in government knows that there’s already too many rules, and it restricts an awful lot. There’s a trend in the places where you see the best government to move away from regulations to outcomes based governing, and the key to doing that is changing the budgeting process. Right now you have an input based budgeting process which, basically, pays people to waste money, to engage in corruption, and guarantees that no one ever keeps track of anything. It’s real simple. Basically, you change the budget so that the money is allocated based on the results you achieved rather than officials saying I think we ought to do this. Okay, give him some money. And no one ever bothers to check and see if it actually got accomplished. Now, it requires significant reform. It starts with professionalization. But each department is required to lay out short-term, long-term goals. If they don’t meet their short-term goals, they don’t get additional funding. You don’t just keep throwing money at something hoping that someday it’ll get better, which means you have to measure the actual results, which means you need an Auditing Department, and that ought to be under the Managing Director. An Auditing Department that does an ongoing and continuous audit, not just internal, but external. So we spend the money, and we didn’t waste it when we were spending it. The question is did the program actually fix the social problem, or the traffic problem, or whatever. So you have to measure the traffic. You have to measure the number of drug addicts. You have to file://\\coh01\cohweb\council\charter_commission\minutes\minutes 03-25-00.html7/1/2011