At the Common Council Executive Committee meeting council members discussed what to do with the report on changes to our government structure. Here’s what they had to say.
This is the Task Force on Structure of Government Structure or the TFOGS report. This is the controversial report that recommends to go to full time council and cut the size of the council in half. But there are many, many other recommendations in there that could be implemented quickly.
CCEC Meeting
This actually is a meeting from last week that I didn’t have time to cover, so I’m circling back to it – to find out what the next steps are for this report. They didn’t have any previously and hopefully this discussion will be enlightening. You can follow along here. This topic starts 24 minutes in to the meeting and is about 25 minutes long.
Motion. Alder McKinney moves to accept the report, and it is seconded.
Background. Alder Rebecca Kemble says this is a long time coming. This whole process started in March of 2016 and it took them a year and 3 different resolutions to establish this task force and then another couple years for the task force to meet over 90 times and finish their work. They would not have been able to do this work in the time that we did without the expert and attentive support of the City Attorney’s Office, in particular Attorney John Strange and City Attorney Mike May. He (John Strange) was really a super star and pulled so much information together for them to consider, especially at the beginning and really without their support we would not have had as in depth of foundation to work with. So the report has 40 or so recommendations, most of them are very high level concepts, we had fits and starts of getting to the weeds with some of them, as Attorney May can attest to. He was there for a lot of that and a number of them, especially those that refer to the Boards, Commissions and Committees (BCCs) and Public Engagement they identified a lot of areas that could be quick wins, that were low handing fruit that they could have a big impact on improving representation and participation. Some were technological, some are organizational, but there was not a lot of super specifics attached to them in the recommendations and that is something that the committee saw as the work of the council. And perhaps in particular CCEC, should take the recommendations and come up with discreet legislative proposals based on each of them. This was a really amazing committee to work on. I know Alder Foster attended a lot of meetings, Alder Furman was part of the committee for the last year and the resident members were so hard working, thoughtful and engaged in the work and they had a wide variety of backgrounds and opinions and that yielded really deep discussion and she thinks all of them changed their minds about a lot of things from when they first started the committee to the end. One of the things they did that really helped was they took a page out of the notebook of the President’s Work Group on Police Issues and suspended Robert’s Rules for most of their meetings in the beginning of the process, right up until they started actually writing the report and that just allowed for a much freer engagement with residents who showed up with other people who came, notably Mayor’s and former Mayor’s, council members and former council members, BCC members and former BCC members. For her, because she is a governance geek it was exciting and engaging to be part of those wideranging discussions without having to have the formality of Robert’s Rules. She thinks that is one of the recommendations coming out of it. She wants to recognize the chair, Eileen Harrington and the subcommittee chairs John Rothschild and Justice Casteneda for excellent work in shepherding what was really complex and intertwined issues and in helping us get to a final product. Process wise they were all really on point and skilled and really helped us. She sees the finance director and Laura are here, all of the members of TFOGS that she has spoken with were very surprised to see the kind of fiscal note that was on this resolution. The co-sponsors of the resolution did not see that ahead of time and she thinks they were expecting template language like they had in the ad hoc police report and the Urban Forestry report that says the final report includes recommendations for future action and accepting the report doesn’t have an immediate fiscal impact. Implementing the recommendations may result in the need for increased funding in the future. They just assumes it would be something like that and they were very, very surprised to see just a few select recommendations pulled out and a lot of work put into analyses on them. In their minds, in the minds of the committee as we planned for and as we hoped recommendations would be implemented, we envisioned a process whereby each recommendation would be taken out and made into a legislative proposal and then a fiscal note would be attached to it. She had a meeting with Dave (Schmiedicke, Finance Director) and Attorney May and she requested some changes, she doesn’t know if – She recognized Dave – he indicates he has no changes – Kemble says they are talking about that now, the motion is for adoption of this, not a substitute. Kemble is asking about the language.
Fiscal Note: Alder Shiva Bidar, Council President and Chair of the Common Council Executive Committee asks if they will have new language tonight or are they referring so a substitute can be made.
Kemble says that is what she is hearing from the Finance Director.
Bidar asks Schmiedicke to come to the table so he is on the microphone. She says if she understands correctly you are in the process of redoing the fiscal note on the resolution that is attached.
Dave Schmiedicke, Finance Director says that they are adding clarifying language that the resolution itself does not make an appropriation or spend money, but that there are proposals in it that might have a fiscal affect. The core of the fiscal note that is in the document will remain but they would add, as he talked about with Alder Kemble and City Attorney May, a preamble that would state that the resolution itself does not create a fiscal impact.
Bidar clarifies “accepting the report”, he agrees.
Alder Barbara McKinney clarifies that accepting the report does not have a fiscal impact, but how and at what point do we say that the implications has a budgetary impact. She was under the impression that as they move forward with all recommendations there is a budgetary indicator that is attached to that. How is that connected to this report.
Schmiedicke says the language in the fiscal note now for the most part would remain, but add language that would make it clear that those are estimated fiscal affects and that the resolution itself, accepting the report, does not make appropriation, or doesn’t bind the city to spend those dollars.
McKinney says there is just the potential of it, ok thank you.
Alder Keith Furman asks if the note could also make it clear that the finance department did make assumptions that they committee did not necessarily provide information for those assumptions. There are some assumptions in that financial note that certainly are laid out in the report, but a lot of them about staffing for example, and costs are estimates that the finance department made based on their interpretation of the report as opposed to actual detail that the committee got into.
Schmiedicke says he thinks they made that pretty clear and we attached how we arrived at those assumptions with a pretty detailed spreadsheet that is also attached to the fiscal note.
Furman says he’ll wait to see the language, thank you.
Kemble suggests, that when they met she asked them to look at #2 item and consult with the chair of the committee because that seems way off to her and to what the committee discussed and to their recommendation and that really does not reflect the recommendation that is in the report. She would ask that they contact the chair of TFOGS to discuss that.
Schmiedicke says that as she asked, they will take a look at that.
McKinney says one of the things she is observing and also recognizing the former members of the Task Force, as we are looking at reports and documents that come before us, and to have that high level look through in terms of budget implications, that is certainly important to us, whether they are actually numbers, we can look at that when the budget implications do come forward, but for us as a body to have a framework from which to work from is really very, very helpful. She understands what the fellow alders are saying, but to have an estimate of what the budget implication is, gives us a framework by which to move forward on. She is very appreciative that was in there, whether it was accurate or not. But that is how we really need to be moving toward how we make budgetary decisions based upon what we experienced in the last budget cycle. Things are very tight, so we really do need to have that kind of information in terms of prioritizing what is so.
Bidar says that the issue that is being raised is about this particular report, but also about looking systematically about what we expect for a fiscal note for all reports. We have another report that is going to be before us as a council tonight that has no specifics and there is going to be fiscal implications, to the implementation of any of the MPD Ad Hoc Committee recommendations. The issue that has been raised is what are the particular assumptions and the involvement of the committee members with the discussion of those assumptions and two, if we want to have this as a way to have fiscal notes for all reports then we should really think about the process language we have for all reports. We just seem to be different process than other reports that we have had before us.
Kemble says at their meeting last week, in her diving into the ordinances and APMs around fiscal notes, there is some unclarity about it and Attorney May is going to work on some clarifying language for the ordinances so they give clear direction about fiscal notes. That should be coming before us.
Bidar says that is a larger issue. As far as the item before them, other discussion? She says what she is hearing is that the sponsors are requesting a referral so there can be a substitute resolution. Any further discussion on the report itself.
They clarify the motion, the motion on the table is to accept the report.
Kemble would like to hear people talk about the report.
What’s Next? Alder Marsha Rummel (not a member of CCEC) is curious to hear from the sponsors what they see as a next step once the report is accepted. It doesn’t make us do anything, is there a plan by anybody, really to move pieces of it forward. Has there been conversation about that that she isn’t tuned in to.
Kemble says yes, there has been. Alder Foster . ..
Alder Grant Foster says that they started a conversation at the last CCEC meeting about this, kind of more broadly, both with the MPD Ad Hoc report, it certainly come up already in our communications work group, in terms of having a body get together, work through an issue, put forward a report with recommendations and then that group is done. Then what? He thinks what they will have on their council agenda tonight for the MPD Ad Hoc Group is a realization that we had a group do the report and recommendations, it just doesn’t end right there and unless it can be fully transferred over to staff and they can run with it, we are going to need another group that is going to focus on implementation. That is his thought with this one as well. The TFOGS did the hard work of going through all the big questions, put forward recommendations as a starting point and so he started drafting with Alder Kemble a possible presidential work group or subcommittee of CCEC or what? A group that would really focus on just what is in the report, not rehash or re-litigate things, not bring in new recommendations, but go through and systematically work through these recommendations to get them in front of the common council. He thinks the Task Force was really clear that they had a lot of deliberation but at the end of the day none of these things are going to happen without the Common Council taking action on them. He thinks the work in front of them from the report is to just organize it and get them in front of the council in a systematic way, since there is a wide spectrum of recommendations. As he is imagining it, it is a group that talks about prioritizing and looking at what they are going to put forward first. He is assuming they will bring that back to CCEC for vetting, for approval for signing off on, what sequence to we take them in, and then doing some work to get additional background information as needed in order for the deliberation to happen at council. He thinks that is part of what finance was doing with the fiscal note, trying to start to work on some of that information that is going to be needed in order to really wrestle with these.
Kemble says given that and given that the sponsors and finance are going to work on a substitute, there may be some tweaking of language in one of the resolved clauses that talks about establishing either a President’s Workgroup or an Ad Hoc subcommittee of CCEC to carry this work forward. If anyone has any ideas about that, thoughts, feelings, now would be the time to express them and then they will work to do the substitute. Just to communicate our commitment to actually getting things done. That would be the point of changing a little bit of the language in the resolution.
Who is going to do the work, why are there all these referrals in the resolution? Bidar calls on City Attorney Michael May who had his hand raised. May says the resolution as proposed asked that the report be referred to this body, Equal Opportunities Commission, the Mayor’s Office, the City Clerk and the IT department to figure out what the next steps are. Because various parts of the report relate to those bodies. He wrote this in his theory was we got committees and we got offices that can deal with most of the things in here, and in the mood of not creating more committees, that is the way this was drafted. Alder Kemble came with maybe a better way to do it with a special committee, but he would just point out that as they go forward. There are two different ways to look at how you approach this.
Bidar says she gets that, but there are parts of this report that doesn’t particularly fit any existing committee. Who is going to discuss whether the council should be part-time or full-time. At some point someone is going to have to actually have a debate about that. Right now we are accepting the report. We are not questioning whether that is a good thing or bad thing, but at some point we need to deliberate that and if we decided that if a vote of the council is what needs to happen then there are things that need to be set in motion to change the structure for the next election. So, in your mind, who was going to have that, what was the process for that?
Attorney May says “this body”. That was his thought. (AGH! Why is the City Attorney making these policy decisions?)
Furman says that the referrals are a little bit vague so re-working that would be beneficial. For example, the idea of referring it to the Mayor’s office, City Clerk and IT department, its not actually clear for what. Are we asking the Mayor’s office to help with implementation of full-time/part-time? I think that is a discussion for CCEC. Are we asking for the restructuring of the Boards, Committees? Absolutely not, based on his work with the committee, they are actually looking to have CCEC talk about that. So he thinks there is a lot of value – and I hate to have a committee to talk about committees – but he does think there is a lot of value in putting together a sub-committee to figure that stuff out and come up with recommendations. One thing they did in the Urban Forestry Task Force, which he thinks worked out really nicely, was once the report was done it was unclear what would happen with the report and how actionable it would be and the committee decided to come up with a sub-committee to keep the committee going a bit longer and they took every single recommendation in there and put it in a spreadsheet and did very detailed outlining of impact, cost to implement, priority and tried to lay out a three year plan related to that and then worked with staff on it as well. They had staff on that subcommittee and the goal is that once the report is accepted is to turn it over to staff. He thinks there is a similar opportunity with this where they can look at the recommendations, rank them, talk about what is low hanging fruit that they could start implementing immediately and there is stuff that definitely requires further discussion, whether that be with the Mayor’s Office, Clerk, IT department, CCEC, other committees etc. Reworking that referral would be incredibly beneficial to make sure this report actually goes somewhere.
Foster says that Furman probably hit on his points, he asks what a referral of this to the City Clerk, for example, what would it look like or what is the expected outcome of that. Is it informational, are they reviewing it, is there an expected outcome of that?
May says for one thing they might want to get information from the City Clerk on the impact on elections of various changes that are proposed in the report. He says they would have some valuable data and information on what those impacts might be. He also thinks that the City Clerk and IT Department are recommendations about how to get more resident input to various meetings that are held with Boards, Commissions and Committees and even the Common Council. He thought their input was good on that. These ones, he had a couple of them and Alder Kemble came up with some more and we added them. He is agnostic about it, he is just pointing out that . . ..
Foster says his question is more process, he gets the value in getting feedback from these and other staff departments, but what he has seen if they were to refer to a sub-unit they would take it up, review it and then recommend adoption or not and maybe some additional recommendations. Is this a normal process where there is some expectation from the recipients to do something, or is it referring it and not expecting it to come back because its already accepted. This is a different process than we would normally refer.
May says this is referral to determine how you are going to carry out various recommendations, that is how it was drafted. Again, he is agnostic about if they do it that way or some other way.
What are they deciding today? McKinney asks for a point of order, what is before them is the acceptance of the report, and not going into the details of the who, what and the rewriting of the recommendations, so she has a question about the process about what is before them tonight and what they can move on.
Bidar says the resolution is before us to accept the report, but the resolution also has a number of items in the resolution. One is a fiscal note, and we just heard there is going to be some clarifying language that is going to be added by the finance department to the fiscal note of the resolution. That will require a substitute and then there is a discussion about whether the resolution, which right now has a clause that refers the report to a number of departments and committees, whether instead of that language, which is kind of broad, if it should have more specific recommendations about forming potentially a committee, sub-committee or designating CCEC in its entirety as the committee that will take on the work once the report is accepted. They would look at each of the recommendations and which ones will get implemented and how that will happen. And debate whether we’re going to implement them or not. She has some opinions about some of this stuff, and at some point she would like to share it with her colleagues, but the time is not when we are accepting them, the time will be when we are actually debating whether we are going to implement them, how much really does it cost to implement them and what is the pros and cons. That is the part they are discussing, the accepting of the report everyone will do, but the fiscal note and who will decide who will take charge of looking at the next phase which is implementation.
McKinney asks if what is before them gets them to that point?
Bidar says that what is before them right now gets them to referring the report to a number of committees and departments as part of accepting the report, it does not specifically say what each committee will be in charge of – such as discussion and implementation of the report.
McKinney asks if accepting the report will be inclusive of referral to the various committees. Bidar says yes, EOC, CCEC and Mayor’s Officer, Clerk and IT.
Again, who will do the work? Kemble says that as they were thinking together about that clause, they were thinking about who we, as sponsors of the resolution, within the context of a committee meeting, were thinking about who the main people would be responsible for this. But now she is thinking that in her work experience in cooperatives, they have a thing when everyone is in charge, no one is in charge and a lot of things fall through the cracks. That is their thinking about taking away all those referrals but saying which is going to be the body in charge of making sure all of those units and administrative units and committees get to engage in how things go. They should really specify what that is, that is the thinking behind it at this point.
Furman accepted to sponsor this and accepted it with the referrals and definitely wants to see it changed now, so he will take blame for where it is, but he does also think this is something we learned through the TFOGs process, when you refer it to places and we aren’t normally specific about why we were referring it, what you end up having is people end up going to all different meetings to talk about all different issues as opposed to being more focused on one. They go to the CCEC to talk about full-time/part-time or go to EOC because they are going to talk about everything. This is a good opportunity for us to come up with a better process for this referral so people aren’t chasing around to different committees to talk about the same thing over and over and over again that may not even be related to that particular committee. He definitely thinks the substitute needs to rework that and he knows Alder Kemble is already working on that.
Bidar says how about we designate CCEC as being the implementer of the next stage and once they are at that point at CCEC and that would require some work from the council staff to create that spreadsheet like Urban Forestry did and then the first thing we can do as CCEC we can look at that and decide if we want to handle it all together or if we want to form a subcommittee for some part of it or another ad hoc committee. But lets move it forward with that step in the resolution so its not simply like the resolution ends with accepting it, but that CCEC is designated as the committee that will look at next steps for implementation. She thinks that it would be important to create that spreadsheet so that we can determine that these 5 belong here and 2 belong in IT and then they can send it to IT but they will report back to CCEC. She thinks they can manage it, does that sound right? There seems to be several people agreeing.
McKinney says yes, then it rests with this body.
The motion is to refer, its seconded and they will add the note to the fiscal note and clarify that CCEC is the body charged to take on the next steps for implementation of the recommendations.
The volume just dropped out at this point.
I presume that is what passed with everyone indicating they were in agreement when Bidar asked. So, stay tuned.
SO, WHAT DOES THE SUBSTITUTE SAY?
It’s still not in legistar, I’d expect it to be in there today or tomorrow? Their next meeting is on Tuesday.
