MIN CHC 1999-08-11 - Laserfiche WebLink

Home

• also a member of the Council when it's done this way and may act as the Chair of the Council, may be elected specifically as the Chair of the Council. There are other jurisdictions which have a City Manager and they only have a Council and the Council selects a Chair or somebody is selected as the Chair of the Council. They don't have somebody named the Mayor. RAY: Thanks, Chris. Mr. Santangelo. SANTANGELO: I'm of the impression that the last Charter Commission did take a hard look at this. It may have been hard or soft, and then it wasn't brought up for various reasons. Is this part of it or can you add anything to why this didn't come forward last time? YUEN: I think that having been there, it was looked at. There were the same kinds of packets of materials that were circulated as to how it worked. There was some discussion. I don't believe it was ever brought up to vote because there clearly weren't six people that wanted to present it to the voters and beyond that I can't really speak for what was going through the minds of the various Commissioners. The decision is basically, of course, not a legal one. It's a decision of what kind of government you want to have which is a policy decision for the Commissioners to make. SANTANGELO: Thank you. RAY: So let's just throw this out. We're trying to get sort of an informal straw vote sense of how everybody feels about this and how much we want to pursue it. As Mr. Yuen said, it would be a pretty monumental undertaking in terms of reorganization or, in fact, a whole new Charter so let's make sure this is something that we understand and do want to pursue and if we're going to turn him loose on it. Okay? Mr. Martin. MARTIN: Yes, you made mention of 44 possible points that would have to be touched on. Is that just a fictitious number or is that something that you actually looked at? YUEN: That's not a real number. That's a made up one but there are quite. a few things that are written in the Charter. The name "Mayor" may appear 44 times and I don't want to exaggerate the - it would be a basic restructuring of the Charter. Naturally, of course, there are plenty of places that have this form of government and we wouldn't sit here and try to do it entirely from scratch because there's a lot of freedom in how you exactly set this up. There are models for how this is done. I'm just saying that it is a basic restructuring of the County government and should be presented as a new Charter to the voters if it's going to be presented to them. •