City Council Preview for Jan 6. Part 2

Last time we looked at a few agenda items for this week’s Council meeting. Today I want to focus on a single item.

COUNCIL AGENDA

For many years the Council required that 3 members vote to allow a Council member to place an item on the agenda. Otherwise agenda items were selected by the City Manager.

Upon joining the council in 2012, one of the first things Council members Nick and Robinson did was to reduce the number needed to 2 from 3 to allow for more diversity and a more democratic process. Fearful that this might open the floodgates to any nit witted idea that 2 Council members could come up with, the Council gave themselves a 6 month review period at which time they could revert to the 3 person system if the 2 person system was counter-productive. When they reviewed it in July 2012 they decided that things were fine and kept the number at 2.

Recently the City Manager has been complaining that he has too much work to do trying to cater to the whims of any 2 City Council members, so he asked to reconsider the rule.

According to the City Manager’s report, in the 2 years since the new policy has been in place, 52 agenda items were initiated. He gives us no indication of how many were initiated in the 2 years prior to the 2-person rule, so it’s really hard to tell whether 52 is a large, average, or small number. But it does raise the question as to why this important information was omitted!

The report claims that 30% of the 52 actions required “a relatively low threshold for staff item preparation”. He provides no more information than this, so we are left to assume that all 70% of the rest of the items required more than “low”, but how much more is not specified. Moreover there is no indication of who the “higher than low” staff time was required of - 10 hours of a lawyer’s time is certainly more expensive than 10 hours of a clerk’s time, but we have no idea of whose time was being used. This seems to be a gross omission.

This lack of specificity is reminiscent of the poor report produced about a year ago in which the City staff studied staff time spent on Traffic Commissions in other cities but neglected to say what level staff was involved. That omission made it impossible to calculate the “cost” of staffing a Traffic Commission, just as the omission of who is spending time doing what in this case also makes it impossible to calculate the differential cost of the 2 person vs. the 3 person rule.

If these deficits are not enough to want to seek consensus on a report on this report (i.e., How can highly paid staff produce such a poor report?), the major deficit in this report is the failure to indicate the value of these 52 items to the quality of life for residents in our City. For example, if many of these 52 items raised by the 2 member rule were items that strike at the very fabric of our City, then the policy is a sound one regardless of how much staff time is being used. Yet we have no data to answer this question.

Also missing is any indication of how many of these 52 items raised under the 2 member rule came back and were passed by the full Council. If the majority of the items were defeated when considered by the full Council, then maybe the 2 member rule is a little too loose. But if the majority is endorsed by the Council, then perhaps this is a good system.

Even worse (Note - can there be even more errors?) the report fails to distinguish between 2 member requests and requests that are actually 3 or more member requests. IOW - just because the rule has been modified to allow consensus at 2 members doesn’t mean that individual items represent the views of only 2 members. Recently I requested consensus on bringing back the wildlife prohibition ordinance and 4 of the 5 members agreed, although it’s recorded as a 2 member request. Thus, we don’t know how many of the 52 items are 2 member requests or how many represent 3 or more member requests.

The bottom line is that this is such a poor report it offers nothing substantive on which to base a decision, and it wastes staff time and Council time.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Dr. Jim Gardner is on the City Council for Lake Forest. You can check him out on LinkedIn and/or Facebook and you can share your thoughts about the City at Lake Forest Town Square on Facebook.