MIN CHC 1999-05-12 - Laserfiche WebLink

Home

• YUEN: Well, I appreciate what Pete is saying and now I remember that it did run very smoothly. And I think that that was the agreement that -, something got voted on and that was pretty much it. Whenever you're looking at, whenever you're starting off with a set of work like this, there are really three kinds of issues that you deal with. There's the big, over -arching basic kind of question. In our Charter Commission ten years ago, this whether to go single member district was a big question. And if you decide to do that, there is a bunch of other things that you have to do that go along with that. And I think that the Commission dealt with that pretty early, as I remember. And the same thing with City Manager. There was some discussion of it at the time. Nobody, I think, was that -, nobody was really -, there were maybe one or two people that were interested in it, but it was clearly not going to go anywhere. If that's going to be seriously considered, then there are a lot of revisions that need to be thought of that follow after that, and that needs to be done early. The second kind of change that one makes in a Charter are the things that may be -, that are a little more specific but they still really make -, they do make a real difference on how things work on the ground. And to give a couple of examples, at the last Charter, there were changes, the Police Commission. The Police Commission was given considerably more power to investigate misconduct at the Police Department. Another example, qualifications of the Planning Director, I believe, and was there another one that we put in the qualifications for? BETHEA: Engineer. YUEN: I think that was -. BETHEA: Didn't we? YUEN: In already. BETHEA: It was already? YUEN: The third kind of issue is just the purely technical, what I would call purely technical issue, and that's where you have provisions in State law that are -, that supercede things that are in the Charter, and you need to fix them because they read differently. And even though the lawyers can sit there and figure out that in this -, you know, and I don't remember what exactly they were, the lawyers can sit there and say, well, this thing in the Charter is no good because it contradicts something in State law which -. In some cases, the Charter will supercede State law, but in other cases the State law will override the Charter. If you leave them in the Charter, people get confused, or people will pick up the Charter and they'll say this is the way it is, and it just causes the lay person to get confused. Those kinds of -, the third area of issue was