Yesterday’s post sent me into the world of Legistar . . . and it turns out the problem was even worse than I thought. As background, there is alot of grumbling and eye rolling whenever you mention Legistar. Legistar is the program that we use to track legislation. It makes alot of information available to the public on-line that previously wasn’t easily available with links on all of the agendas . . . if it is done right. While people like to roll their eyes about Legistar and blame things on the program, what you quickly realize is that often, it’s human error not the program. One item from yesterday’s post was really bugging me, so I started asking some questions about the Fair Housing Testing RFP and since I was at it, I asked about the Economic Development RFQ – turns out, there is more to the story.
FAIR HOUSING
I couldn’t imagine how we would have passed this item with no detail. Sometimes I don’t read every single word of the council packet, but you’d think I would have noticed a completely blank piece of paper – I wasn’t that sloppy. I called a city staff person to help me figure it out. As we were talking we figured out not only was there no detail about the language, there were no sponsors, no fiscal note, no anything. So the next logical question was, how did it get on the agenda. Well, turns out, the council never saw it. I figured it was one of the hundreds of items that we routinely pass every month and that I just blew it. Typically, we approve these RFPs (Request for Proposals) but it actually never went to council. Why? Legistar says it “passed” the council. Turns out a staff person entered that is “passed” after the CDBG Commission. So, it never got to the point where it would even get on the council agenda. So we never passed anything beyond the budget language authorizing $30,000 for “Fair Housing Testing” – not a study.
ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT
So, next I just had to ask – what happened with the RFQ (Request for Qualifications) for the Economic Development Plan. When I couldn’t find it in Legistar, I asked council staff to find me what passed the council because I couldn’t find it. She sent me something. I thought she found something that I couldn’t find and that the document she sent me was what passed the council. Turns out, it wasn’t. Turns out, we never passed the RFQ. We never decided what we wanted we wanted in our request for a strategic plan.
Somehow, this makes me feel both better and worse. At least I know I didn’t make a mistake on a council agenda. On the other hand, what the heck is going on? Why can’t we get these simple routine processes right? Why aren’t we following our own processes? Where are these processes written down? Are they written down? How many other things like this are out there? Something tells me that this is one of those situations where I should stop asking questions cuz I’m not going to like the answers.
Note: Links on this post are limited because of the mistakes. The public version of the program doesn’t let you see what we can now finally see through the program we have on our new laptops and some of the links are now broken because of trying to fix the errors.
