On Tuesday the CCEC (Common Council Executive Committee) spent the last 12 minutes of their meeting hearing from and talking to the Public Safety Review Committee (PSRC) chair and members of the committee. Given all the policing issues members are wondering why their committee had been passed over and they are frustrated that they can’t get the information they need, but they also admit their members are new and that they want more of a role in budget discussions before they are submitted to the mayor. See what else they talked about.
Marsha Rummel says there are two items that they are dealing with and at some point the PSRC had invited the committee members to come to their meeting and she asked to have it referred so she could hear from CCEC members to give feedback to help with the direction. The idea was that they would help review the role, charges and members of the PSRC and they are asking what that means. She wanted to have a conversation to inform whomever goes to speak with them a sense of the body.
Shiva Bidar says that from being a member of the committee was that the conversation should start with PSRC, but not us. They were trying to reflect on how to strengthen the role of the PSRC and its mission. Alders who had been off and on PSRC have talked about it. When she voted for it she wanted to start with those closest to it, the committee themselves, do they see any places for changes in the ordinance, and do they want to propose something. Do they see ways to improve the standing of that committee in the processes policing issues. She was surprised by the invitation because she doesn’t have any special ideas of it, I think it needs to come from PSRC up to us and then we’ll discuss it and it can go back and forth.
Rummel invites the two citizen members of the committee that are present to speak. Deb Julian is the chair of PSRC and she says that she has been the chair less than a year and she was appointed just over two years ago, the committee has been transition since she started. Alder Skidmore has been on there a very long time and he has more history, but other than Alder Skidmore she is the ranking member. Everyone else has been there since the new alders were appointed – Alder Zellers and Alder McKinney – and she thinks that is great because she thinks they think like her, when she was appointed she wanted the committee to be more (I think she was trying to say proactive, but she said affirmative action – she says “bad choice of words I guess”) A positive force in moving public safety issues forward and her lack of experience has been a hindrance to her. When she saw the item on the report she was confused. They had a meeting last July where they all sat down in a room and talked about where they wanted to go and did brainstorming with a mediator to get some direction. They still have two vacancies on the committee, or one just got filled, but she feels that they don’t get a lot of support from the council. When the body camera committee was appointed, no one from the PSRC was appointed, when the Ad Hoc committee was appointed no one from the PSRC was even consulted or asked to be on that committee and this seemed to be part of their mandate with people who are concerned and wanted to talk about these issues. So that wasn’t very supportive of the committee. She has also found that one of the charges is to look at the budgets for the police and fire department. They ask and for some reasons it can’t come to them before the mayor has it and they don’t get to see their thoughts and give input before the budget is submitted. She doesn’t really understand that. So when she saw this item she thought the council had some idea of what they should be or how they should move forward. Since they are still new, she thought the council might have some ideas about what they should be and it would be very helpful for them to get input from them or refer things to them more proactively.
Denise DeMarb asks about the alders that sit on her committee – she says there seems to be confusion. She says that members of the committee are appointed by the Mayor and only approved by the council and there shouldn’t be confusion because alders on the committee should be able to answer these questions for you – Deb starts to say she’s not confused, but DeMarb clarifies she is talking about the alders answering questions about how the budget works. It’s the mayor’s budget, no one sees it until he’s ready to give it to us. She asks if they use the alders in that way – Julian says they do and they have difficulty filling vacancies. Then DeMarb says what about the body camera and ad hoc committee – Julian says she is not confused by how that happened as much as how the council wouldn’t say “hey shouldn’t someone from PSRC about that as well”, DeMarb asks if they talked to the three alders on their committee. Julian says when the committees were formed those were not the alders on the committee but she says Alder Skidmore did request it but it didn’t happen.
Bidar says it is not at all unusual for us to review the charges of committees over time, because they were there before her time, maybe Alder Verveer was around. We have to review them over time, even some of the language that is used is a little more arcane than what we would say now, to make it more clear. They changed the name of this committee just last year to make it more understandable to the public. We do this on a regular basis, especially because of the conversations that you talked about and because we have heard the committee doesn’t feel very elevated or seen as important by the council or the members of the public. She would say that its great to hear they had the meeting to discuss you mission, roles, etc – if you can take that and look at the ordinance and tell us what is missing here that needs to be clearly stated. The first set of discussion needs to be at the committee level, you know best about what you want your role to be and hopefully the three alders can sponsor and change the ordinance language and then it will go through the process. That is the process they were intending to set in motion – to come up with a strategic plan about what they want their role to be and then change the ordinance language to reflect that and then bring it through our process to reflect those changes in the new language. You mentioned the budget, if you want to clearly have some role in the budgetary process, that would have to be spelled out. You may decide as a committee to propose that – it would have to go through some debate because other committees don’t do that – not even the council looks at it before the mayor does. It needs to come from you, not the other way down.
Rummel says that three of them have to leave, so could they have a motion.
Mike Verveer says the Finance Committee can wait because they are all there and maybe the Finance Director is, but even the Mayor is not in town. He says he served on the PSRC and the one change they made was it went from a Board to a Committee in the 1990s. He wants them to know that they were dealing with the same things in the 1990s – that they were a committee in search of a mission, a role in public safety in the community. We had the same issues that the ordinance says they budget and finance are the purview for the committee and yet they had difficulty having the chief fit them into their time before they have to submit their budget to the mayor, and we would see the budget after its published which isn’t that meaningful. Its just a presentation. He was curious about the remark that you had asked for more of a role in the budget and felt shut out (he says that he is putting words in her mouth) but did you ask for presentations and they declined or what happened?
Julian says that it wasn’t “declined” but we are busy trying to do this amongst ourselves and we don’t have time and we don’t have anything to put in front of you and I guess I don’t care if they give us specific numbers, but their general heres what we want and what do you think about us going after this wad of money – instead of specific numbers, looking at do we need more ambulances or don’t we? That kind of thing. That is what she thinks they should be talking about upfront – hey, we’ve thought about building a new fire station or police station and we’d say no or more fully support it.
Verveer says his advice is to be more persistent and now that they have done that heavy lifting of submitting that request they should present to you on the capital budget – the Mayor basically agreed on their request. They should also give you a presentation on what their request was – that is public record now too. You would still have an opportunity to give feedback on the capital budget because that is before us now and on the operating budget about how many more police we need. He wants to encourage her to not take no for the answer and insist on budget presentations at their next meeting. It would be very impactful because you advice to them and the elected officials would be meaningful to us.
Julian says on the question you through to us, it didn’t really occur to her that you would restructure unless you had some motivation to do it – and if you did it because you do it occasionally ok – but I didn’t get that impression.
Rummel says there are alders in the queue – thank you Deb – but we really need to move on to the finance committee.
McKinney says she really needs to say something (what she said exactly wasn’t clear because she was off mic, but the meeting was in the same room as the council and they had the same microphone issues so I couldn’t hear anything most of the time – I had to plug in to the system and listen later). She promises to be brief. She requested to be on the committee because she viewed it as one of the strongest committees that we face, with the climate we were in. The challenge has been that because the committee has not been actively engaged in not popular and challenging issues before us, the question is to come and ask permission for us to get engaged and I don’t feel I have to come and ask permission to be engaged. Everything that includes public safety is our charge. Deputy Mayor Gloria Reyes came and we were asking her what is our charge, we had our strategic planning . . .
Rummel interrupts and says that we have to go, the finance director has come to get us, we only have 7 minutes left, she doesn’t mean to be rude but they have to go. There is a move to adjourn and a second, Rummel apologizes again for cutting her off and thanks Julian and Mary Anglim for coming.
I guess the discussion will continue at PSRC now???
