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• • area that the. County Council has a tough time dealing with politically, setting these rates. So the Commission wouldn't be empowered to set the rates, but hopefully would have a positive influence on engaging the public more in terms of more responsible rate structures. Number 6, this is entitled 6 and 10, Planning Department functions. There are two areas here. One was generated by an Administration initiative where the Mayor and the departments came to us early on in the process and asked that we create a Division of Permitting in the Public Works Department, and to remove all the subdivision functions from the Planning Department, and to move those over to Public Works. And their rationale is that this would be a more efficient way to 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 6