2000-04-01 Charter Commission Minutes

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minutes 04-01-00Page 12 of 22 deal with this situation with the current Police Chief. He would be an impeachable officer. Now, officers of the Police Department are not officers of the County. They are employees. However, the Police Chief is an officer of the County. So, a hundred people would be able to take that to court and get some resolution before a judge. People are pretty upset about that right now. HERKES: Excuse me just a minute. PRANKE: Yes ma’am. HERKES: Mr. Ray, I think that probably is something that should go to our attorney, to ask whether that’s legal to impeach an appointed person. PRANKE: Not recall. I don’t think you could recall a non - HERKES: I understand. I just want the attorney to make a decision. PRANKE: Yes, I understand. I don’t think you could recall a non-elected official, but an appointed official, as you said before, their rules and regulations have the force and effect of law. They’re almost lawmakers. Officers of the County are lawmakers, in a sense, and they should be accountable. At the current position, the only thing that you could say was if somebody appointed to a Board or Commission, and as I’ve showed, the Mayor doesn’t appoint them and the Council doesn’t appoint them, it’s a joint process; you’d have to say if somebody is grossly negligent in a position, could you impeach the Mayor for nominating them, or could you impeach the Council. And that’s obviously, kind of, absurd. So, I think they should be impeachable. Okay, I’m sorry. Mr. Martin. MARTIN: Yes, I had a comment on to what you were saying about specifically the Police Chief. And not to say that the system isn’t working, but in place is a Commission that can, and is more than possible to, remove a sitting chief. So, I agree with you that there may be times that other appointees, somewhat, should be accountable to the people, and not so much to the Mayor and/or Council, and I agree with you. But at present, the chief could have been removed at any time by the Commission. PRANKE: Some people see that as political because all of the members of the Police Commission have been appointed by the current Mayor and the current - GOODELL: Nominated. PRANKE: Oops, sorry. Exactly. I’ve fallen into it. Let the cat out of the bag and whip me. Well, I think you get the point and I don’t want to take up - I told you at the last meeting I attended I’d give you five. I only gave you four proposals. The one that I really struggled with here was having a standing Charter Review Commission and a Reapportionment Commission. That’s going to take a lot of writing and I don’t have a secretary so I will work on that and get that kind of a possibility. We shouldn’t go through this every ten years. If there’s some errors in the Charter that need to be changed, we should be able to do that every couple of years. HERKES: We did it. Look at this. I’ve got pasted all over. PRANKE: I know. You guys did it, but here you come having to put almost 20 things before the voters, and that’s going to be confusing to them. So, I’m in favor of having a standing Charter - And I put in there the process I thought should be used. And apparently you don’t disagree with me because number 19, the Cost-of-Government Commission, you’re saying would be appointed by the Council, which is the way I put this – one person from each Council district. HERKES: Actually, Mike Christopher came up with a tremendous - I guess, it’s San Diego that has a Civil Jury system. Everybody can throw their names into a hat. They just draw them out, and I really like that as a system for picking something like a Cost-of-Government Commission. I wanted to thank you, especially, for the one that you didn’t mention and that was the conduct of employees. PRANKE: Oh, I’m going to get to that. HERKES: Okay, do you want to do it first? I wanted to thank you for that. file://\\coh01\cohweb\council\charter_commission\minutes\minutes 04-01-00.htm7/1/2011