2000-04-29 Charter Commission Minutes

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Transcript of Meeting of April 29, 2000Page 5 of 64 appointing one member from each district. The person coming under the oversight shouldn’t be appointing these people. It just makes sense. I’m against putting in a Fire Commission until we get the Police Commission settled. If we have a Fire Commission, which should also be an oversight committee, appointed again by the political body that it’s supposed to oversee, again we have the problem of no real oversight. So, on those particular items, that’s how I would like to see it go. I gave you the proposed changes that I had the last time. We met with Citizens for Justice and they agreed that we can represent these as the will of Citizens for Justice. They are in favor of the proposed changes that I put in to you. The change that would allow any officer of the County to be impeached. And again, we have right here on this board, a situation where that - Mr. Alonzo and Mr. Balog hadn’t been here since September. This is the first meeting that Mr. Alonzo’s come back, and even though you’re from my district, I think you should exempt yourself from voting because I’ve been to more meetings than you have since September, and I don’t know enough about this to be able to vote. If Mr. Balog and Mr. Alonzo weren’t going to come to the meetings for a long period of time, they should have withdrawn, or the Mayor should have had the Council take them off of this Commission and appoint new people who would come to the meetings. Unfortunately, that didn’t happen because of politics. If we were able to impeach Officers of the County, we would have been able to impeach those folks and have new people put on who would have been here to the meetings. The conduct of the employees. I was glad to read in the paper that you were considering that a lie would be a violation of the Code of Ethics. I appreciate that. I’m calling that the Coco Pierson Amendment. And fixing this part of the Charter where the records and meetings are open to the public, where the Charter has been construed in violation of the State Law, the Sunshine Law. I think that’s an important thing to fix. Thank you for your time and listening to me. SANTANGELO: I have a question. RAY: Okay. Mr. Santangelo. SANTANGELO: Del, just help me with a little bit of the separations of power thing here. One thing I don’t like to try to buy into is this thing that everybody’s crooks and that everybody’s messing with everybody, but we have to set our government up, and our government should be set, for checks and balances so that we move forward in the most open way. So, when it comes to County Council appointing, can you help me, where you’re coming from in terms of how that strengthens our separations of power, when we look at Legislative, Executive and Judicial? PRANKE: Sure. Well, as Sandra said, we have a strong Mayor and we all know that, and I’m not necessarily saying we should change that. It would take a whole major change of the Charter. However, when the Charter was set up there was no separation set up for oversight committees. These are not committees who make policy. These are committees; the Ethics Board, the Police Commission, the Board of Review, and if you put in a Fire Commission, those would be oversight committees designed to oversee, for the public, what the politicians are doing. Now, even if they’re not crooks, and I’m sorry to use that term - Even if what’s going on is untoward, there can be mistakes made, as I think might have been the case here with Mr. Yuen’s case, where it was not easy to determine whether a problem had occurred. And in that case, a Board that oversees these things should be as neutral as possible. Now, file://\\coh01\cohweb\council\charter_commission\minutes\minutes 04-29-00.html7/1/2011