2000-04-01 Charter Commission Minutes

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minutes 04-01-00Page 4 of 22 organize this; sort of one-stop shopping in terms of the permitting. We decided not to pursue this in terms of the tact we took with the Department of Environmental Services. In other words, mandating that this happen, but right now the suggestion is that we address this in the Charter by eliminating language in the Charter which would require a Charter Amendment if a future Administration would like to bring forth this type of reorganization in the future. So, what the Charter language would do is it would take language out of the Charter which would be a barrier to this type of future reorganization. So, it doesn’t mandate, it doesn’t move, a reorganization in that direction, other than it eliminates Charter language which would preclude that from happening. In other words, right now in the Charter, if you wanted to do that in the future, you’d have to amend the Charter before that type of reorganization would take place. This would eliminate the language in the Charter so that if, in the future, this were to be brought forward. The other two items have to do with Planning Commission powers; one in terms of the authority in the Special Management Areas, the other is the ability of the Planning Commission to put forth rules and regulations having the effect of law. These are basically things that are done right now. It’s just kind of stating this in the Charter. This is meeting substantial confusion and opposition in the public, so my thought, right now, is it’s probably not worth it to bring these forward, and we may drop them. It just seems to be creating a lot of needless confusion and opposition. We haven’t discussed this in the Commission since we’ve gotten public input along these lines, so I don’t know which way we’ll go on this, but it’s not something we have to do. It’s just something, actually our legal counsel, Chris Yuen, suggested we, kind of, try to clean this up and address this in the Charter. It’s not anything that has to be done, so whether we put these forward or not, I don’t know. We’ll see. The next one, Number 7, the Legislative Research Office, is kind of the same way. The discussion has been to come up with language that addresses how that office really works. This is one of the two offices under the County Council. They have a Council Services Office and then basically they have a Legislative Research Office which services the various committees on the County Council, and is responsible for handling legislation, either suggested by the Administration or by Council member. It never has, and it doesn’t now, function as a Legislative Auditing Office, and it’s always caused a lot of confusion among the public. But the kind of input we’re getting from the public is we’d like to see more auditing going on. Why are you eliminating this? Why don’t you go the other direction and create an Auditing Department, or whatever? So it wouldn’t change the way things function now. It would just more directly address how this office works. So, there again, I would characterize this as, kind of, being up in the air as far as whether we pursue it or not, so we’ll have to see how everybody feels about it. Number 8, the Holdover of Members of Boards and Commissions, is basically just increasing the holdover period from the existing 30 days to 90 days. This was suggested by a number of the Boards and Commissions, just to give more time to get folks in place. So that’s what the holdover’s about. The Safety Coordinator. There again, this is cleaning up the reality of how things work in the County. The majority of the functions spelled out in the Charter, to be dealt with by a Safety Coordinator, are dealt with internally, and we think quite well, by the separate departments. So, basically the way it’s portrayed in the Charter now is not the way it works, so the suggestion is rather than having a separate section here dealing with this, in the Charter, to move the position to the Civil Service Department, and deal with that function under the Civil Service Department, but not have a separate Safety Coordinator position which would be mandated to deal with these functions, which the departments are individually and separating dealing with now. Qualification of Heads of Departments of Public Works and Water Supply. This was based on a discussion which took place last year in regard to the need for the head of these departments being a registered engineer. Our feeling, in discussing this, is that these jobs are more administrative than engineering in nature, and why not remove this barrier so that it would allow a non-registered engineer to be head of these departments. We had an occasion where our Chief Engineer retired and the Deputy Chief Engineer, who most people felt was able and qualified to step in in that position was precluded from doing that. He is an engineer. He has an engineering degree, but is not a registered engineer, and so under the Charter, he wouldn’t be allowed to do this. There again, this has come under a lot of flack from public testimony. It seems to be confusing the public that, on one hand we want to raise standards of Departments Heads, and we seem to be going in the other direction in regard to this. So, I’d say this one is up for grabs whether we proceed with this or not. It’s not, I don’t think, really a big deal one way or the other. But we’ve received a lot of testimony either in opposition or in concern with how this one goes, so we very well may pull this. Qualifications of Department Heads. We’re just trying to raise the standard -- reviewing the whole Charter and raise the standards. And we’re going to try to come up with a little more uniform language in terms of the standards for these different Department Heads. But they are very different, and a concern we’ve had is that, especially in terms of salaries, they’ve been treated, in the past, pretty much the same, everybody being, kind of, lumped in as a Department or Deputy Department Head, being paid exactly the same. And that doesn’t make sense to us because in terms of the professional qualifications and the responsibilities of running some of these larger departments, seem to be much greater, and lesser in some cases, so it’s logical file://\\coh01\cohweb\council\charter_commission\minutes\minutes 04-01-00.htm7/1/2011