So, not much has changed on the list, but here it is. It is followed by an interesting conversation about what power the committee has. Turns out the guys that wanted the government structure discussion because the executive (mayor) has too much power, also think the Council Executive Committee shouldn’t have more power either. I don’t get it.
Common Council Executive Committee policy goals for 2018-2019
Alder Samba Baldeh asked for the council members to express their policy issues so he knows what he should talking to the mayor about in leadership meetings. They go around the room and this is what the alders had to say:
Track the OIR process and be aware of all the recommendations – have alders volunteer to attend – Rummel
Continue to follow up on violence prevention initiatives (15 point plan or other variations) – Rummel
RESJI – Rummel
Judge Doyle Square and financial items – Rummel
Affordable Housing – Rummel
Tracking the Task Force on Government Structure – Clear
Reviving the ad hoc committee on alternative revenue to study the wheel tax (vehicle registration fee) – Clear
Executive and legislative power differences – Ahrens
Ability of managerial staff, the mayor and department heads to use city employees and resources to conduct grass roots advocacy campaigns on issues before the council – Ahrens
Surveillance workgroup updates – Bidar
Updates on all task forces – Carter
TIF job policy – Carter
HR process review and department audits – Kemble
Bus barn and Metro financing – Kemble
Broader Transportation changes and smooth transition with the new committee, new director – Rummel
Paul Skidmore went 4th and had nothing to add, of course. Ahrens suggested the APM application to alders, Skidmore declined “not at this time”
Shiva Bidar said she agrees with everything up there except the Judge Doyle Square might not belong in this committee because it is too specific. Marsha Rummel says its more about the broader policy that is just another project that costs more that they are forced to vote on.
Sheri Carter thinks that Judge Doyle Square is a broader issue that affects them all.
Samba Baldeh says everything is added that he wanted, but he wants to look more into equity and opportunity to most vulnerable members – what policies are we really putting in place to address the needs of the most vulnerable population. They point out the RESJI is already up there.
There is also a brief discussion about the time this committee meets. Ahrens says the meeting often gets cut short because they have to go to the council meeting or a council briefing before the meeting. They have an ambitious list of things to address and many items just get put off to the next meeting. No other meeting has a cut of time like this one. Bidar says they should consider many options to resolve this, like possibly not having council briefings before the council meeting. Carter says that the agenda should be drafted with the time constraints in mind. They agree to address this later on the agenda, and that never happens because they get cut off. Irony.
What Authority and Power does the Executive Committee have?
Even tho they just had this discussion in the past year and renamed committees, etc. it seems they still don’t know what they can and cannot do. Attorney May wrote a memo about his concerns and here is a copy of the ordinance that says what they can and cannot do.
Attorney Michael May explains his memo, he says its an expansion on the comment at the last meeting about what the ordinance says and what the committee does and how that changes depending upon who the president of the council is. He gave them examples of language from other committees and he thinks the council needs to address two issues – one is that because the committee can take up anything referred here – can anything be referred? Or do you want to limit it? The second issue is “more troubling” to him and that is that the very specific things the committee is supposed to do and he sees things on the agenda that don’t go to the sources of authority and they should either stick to that or change the ordinance. Do you want to place limits on what comes here or not, or do you want it set up so anything is fair game. All of the issues they listed are already in other committees, none of these issues have been referred to them by the council, (except the jobs tif, which was referred but it will come to them last). He says “its just an observation.”
Rebecca Kemble asks what the language the finance director uses to bring items to the finance committee. May reads the language from the memo.
Shiva Bidar asks how the finance committee gets things directly from the mayor on the agenda, particularly the items that were not introduced to the council, but go directly to finance committee. May says it shouldn’t happen, sometimes there are emergencies for items that are adopted under suspension of the rules. However, the Mayor is the chair and he can put things on the agenda. May says that there are two issues – how does he do it, and can he do it for items not already referred. May points out the items that are put directly on the agenda still come to the council and are adopted under suspension of the rules.
Bidar points out the chair develops the agenda, but then May is saying that the items have to be introduced, which is it? May says the chair decides.
Bidar asks if there is anything that they should be aware of from a legal perspective about how broad the role of the executive committee should be and she makes reference to the research materials (power point, other examples of legislative executive committees) they reviewed earlier. May he says that he didn’t review them. He says its not a legal issue, but you may end up with committees with cross policies – it’s a policy matter. He says they probably couldn’t have an executive committee that can take any action the main body could, but otherwise he didn’t see anything that is a legal issue.
Marsha Rummel says that it’s a committee with “super oversight” but there are many silos, how do we keep a 30,000 ft look at if we are moving forward, is there a way to have us establish a biannual or annual policy document and manage it? May says that they would give the body ability to make their own policy. Rummel says that she would want the policy agenda to be set by the council.
Mark Clear says that the council could delegate wider authority to be the meta committee – he says it could be items that don’t have a home, or things they don’t want to lose track of or anything they decide to take up.
Kemble says that they have section 4b in the ordinanc – they can develop policy agendas at every level (state, county etc) but their own, that doesn’t make sense. May suggests that they change the language to allow themselves to to take up an item without a referral.
Bidar says there is a precedence of the committee coming up with a few items, creating committees and working on them.
Kemble says that they should be able to come up with new ideas, not just items already developed, they should be able to develop policy.
Samba Baldeh asks how they know that the council wants those issues discussed?
Kemble says they could do a retreat, create committees, do a committee of the whole.
Sheri Carter says the first step is to expand the language.
Baldeh says his concern is that they would have two legislative bodies and that things decided at the committee will be what the council passes and so they committee would be replacing the council, he doesn’t see any issue with the language as it is.
Kemble points out that is what they just did in the exercise about council priorities.
David Ahrens says that he didn’t think May was objecting to what they did in the past and that it can continue the way they are doing things. He says there have been no objections from the community, city attorney or mayor. We have just gone about our business and sometimes its an accordion, some council presidents see it broadly and sometimes it shrinks a great deal. He is cautious about giving the committee a super authority that oversees or bridges all other committee work. He doesn’t see the need for this committee to be a super committee.
Bidar thinks that if we are doing it we should be explicit about it, that it is good to say it. The one piece is that we want to be discussing things, the other piece is that there is something about our ability to function as a mini committee of the whole. Its hard to have a discussion with 20 people. Also, if there are things that are not ready, if we can’t call 7 people and find out what they want to have drafted then here is an opportunity to have discussion before we introduce legislation instead of introducing and then talking about it. We could have saved a lot of people a lot of time if you had the ability to think things through with other alders in advance. The issue she sees is what issues should come to this committee and which are better at other city committees. She says this committee should be for items that don’t already have a committee home so they don’t need to create another committee or for things that are stuck. She thinks that if there are times she would bring issues forward if she could discuss it with other colleagues, but if she’s just sitting in her home trying to do it by herself it doesn’t happen. In other sectors, executive committees are the ones that deal with issues – how do we handle this, how do we crate a proposal before it gets introduced.
Enis Ragland from the Mayor’s office asks what happens if there is a super-committee and a quorum of the council shows up? Several alders say they just notice it as a possibility of quorum of the council, all their agendas already say that. Ragland asks if that is a good idea? Several alders say it might be better since its noticed. May says that it is ok with open meetings laws.
Carter says that this is that we want to get referrals but we want to seek out other things to discuss and she wonders if Attorney May has some words that marries both of those in the ordinance. She doesn’t want to be limited to referrals, but to talk about things that are pertinent.
Kemble asks about the dual legislative process Samba talked about and what Attorney May would say about it.
Baldeh asks why they have a need to change this, we have been able to get referrals from council, but his concern is that if the entire council shows up and agrees, what would people say about that? He says the powers the committee have is because that is what they need, he hasn’t heard a compelling reason to change. If something passes here it will pass council and what is the point of the council. He says if nothing is broken, why would they fix it.
Kemble says there is a gap, a reason to do it, this council hasn’t had the mechanism to move their collective priorities forward with out individual council members doing it or the committees doing it. They don’t have the power to enact their priorities in a robust way that is based on their collective thinking.
May says that as he hears what is being proposed he says they would “develop legislation” which would be new. It would be done by the time it gets to council. The second thing is to explicitly state you can look at citywide priorities and make a recommendation to the council, that isn’t explicitily in there and the third thing is to look at overlapping matters. May says that he understood Samba to be against the development of legislation.
Paul Skidmore says that the body is exercising authority it doesn’t have. What he is hearing is that they are choosing to look at the language and allow that authority. He says if you want to bring something up “legitimately” it can be referred to a committee. He says that mechanism is there, he says there is a “danger” in creating a super-committee that would create workgroups and bring forward legislation.
Bidar says that there is a difference between developing legislation and discussion. She says we can’t develop legislation in the two hours we have. We want to codify the ability to discuss broad city policies. Part of the discussion may be that there is a gap, but someone will still have to do the work. However, the work will have the benefit of discussion, instead of her writing it in her home. She prefers to do this in an open meeting and then the public knows what they are discussing and they may come and proactively inform us instead of acting on something that has been introduced. She says there is a gap for broad citywide discussion. She says the super-committee is the finance committee and its appointed by the mayor. Mostly whatever they decide happens, including the budget, the biggest annual discussion they have. We all show up there as a quorum of the council, how is that any different? It happens during the budget time, 98% of the conversation happens there. She says they shouldn’t dismiss their own ability to do their work. We keep talking about doing things differently and dismantling systems and she would challenge them to think about it. This system has not been static, they have added things to the roles of the committee, we should not say this is static.
Rummel says that the term “super” or executive committee it was from the language in the memo and she wouldn’t have necessarily used that. She likes the idea of them as a body creating priorities. What she is concerned about is how is that being managed? She doesn’t want to develop legislation here. She says that if you look at the language on the CCEC it has changed over the last 20 years – She hopes that May can come up with language to develop policies designated by the council.
May says he’ll be gone for the next meeting.
Heather Allen, council staff, says that over the past 6 years the committee has been very functional in a way that is unique, the feedback is nuanced, she can get feedback earlier and she wants them to protect the functional dialogue that happens here and it is helpful to her work.
They adjourn.
Call me silly, but . . .
I’m seriously considering running for mayor (too early to know) and if I win I may have a different opinion but I can see no reason for the council to voluntarily limit their power. It seems insane to me. And it’s particularly ironic in that they seem to be having a power struggle with the Mayor’s office and yet, when given the opportunity to have the power to do more, some of the same committee members that put the legislative/executive power discussion on the agenda and drove the need to have a Government Structure Task Force aren’t interested in having more power. They are unnecessarily tying their own hands. I’m thoroughly confused.
When I was on the council we had this same debate. It essentially boiled down to the council president was elected by the council and they are only there for a year and if you don’t like what they do and how they use that committee, elect someone else. When I was council president, I very much used that to be able to have public hearings on things I thought were important (public input and access) and used the CCOC (now CCEC) as a sounding board for ideas and to refer things to so the full council didn’t have to have a debate on the floor. It was a place to have discussion and work out amendments. I don’t know why they wouldn’t want to do this? At least its a public venue where the alders can openly discuss their thoughts without walking quorum and do things openly and ethically. I’m baffled. (or maybe I’m not, maybe they like the secrecy and backroom power brokering?) I even think a Mayor Brenda would want this – its open and transparent and will lead to better policy options and discussions.
