Week 3 Study Commission Notes
Yesterday was the most recent Optional Forms of Government Study Commission meeting at the County Administration building. With as contentious of a subject this is, I was surprised to see that there were only 2 other members of the public in the room besides myself. To be fair, this is the first meeting I have been able to attend, and the commission has already met twice before. If there is one weekly meeting that everyone should try to make a priority it should be this one. This topic is going to be at the forefront for the next year and it’s worth our time to make every effort to attend in person. (I’m saying this to myself as much as everyone else. Lol) There is no time for public comment at every meeting, but through last night’s discussion the commission *may* be having some public feedback meetings to check the pulse of the community at large. Check back for more info when it becomes available.
This meeting had a long agenda and they got to work quickly. I have made notes throughout the entire thing but before we get to that, they discussed public comment and when to allow it in the meetings. They aren’t allowing public comment in the meetings, but anyone can email them their comments. They were surprised that NO ONE had really emailed them their public comments. This is our chance to send our comments to them and they said they will take them into consideration when going through this study. Their specific email addresses are not available yet, but until they are please feel free to send your public comments to Nancy Jones at njones@kcgov.us.
As a reminder, here’s the list of the commission and alternates:
- Brian Cleary
- Robert Fish
- Kristen Wing
- Dave Botting
- David Levine
- Phil Ward
- Kurt Andersen
- Tamara Bateson
- Bryant Bushing
- Bruce Mattare, alternate
- Joan Genter, alternate
- Dr. Cheri Zao, alternate
Through the approval of last week’s minutes I found:
- The 3 alternates will be included in the discussion instead of just observing.
- There is a list of questions that the study commission will be trying to answer including:
- Should we recommend relieving commissioners of some of their responsibilities?
- Should we recommend more commissioners?
- Should elected positions even be elected?
- Should the clerk and treasurer each be handled by one person or should those positions be split into multiple people?
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- The meetings will be limited to 90 minutes per meeting, once a week on Wednesdays at 5:00pm in the County Administrative Building.
Commission Chair Dave Bottling started the meeting addressing the rest of the commission:
- We have been tasked to decide if the current form of government is the most efficient and effective option available to the county.
- To that end, we need to understand our current form of government and the decisions to be made.
- The 3 categories of County Commissioner responsibilities fall into Administrative, Legislative, and Quasi-Judicial.
- Been told the County Commissioner have approximately 400 meetings per year.
- Two primary decisions we need to make as a commission:
- Should we recommend relieving the commissioners of their administrative functions?
- Should we increase the # of commissioners?
- There are 12 ancillary decisions put forward in the statutes including:
- There are 6 elected county role officials: clerk, treasurer, assessor, sheriff, coroner, prosecuting attorney. Should they be elective or appointive?
- Should the clerk and treasurer be left as single offices or split up into multiple offices?
- Among assessor, sheriff, coroner, and prosecuting attorney, should those offices be left as is or consolidate any number of these offices, eliminate one or more, or combine their efforts into another office?
- Every interview, every subject we raise, should be directing all of that towards answering the above questions.
Meeting Time Limits
Because there is a limit of how long they can meet (ID statute says one year), Dave Bottling wants to limit discussion for each agenda item to 20 minutes. “Personally I feel it is too limiting, but it is a consequence of the decisions made last week.” (Limiting meetings to 90 minutes each.) It is limited to keep the comments concise and allow everyone to be heard but this could get interesting if a topic creates a lot of discussion.
Discussion Graph
- Brian Cleary created a graph that proposed a timeline of events to keep the study commission on track. This is broken up into three categories: Information Gathering, Discussion, Action. Action means answering the question of do they recommend a change of government or not?
- Wants to have everything completed by the end of year.
- After New Years, put out the recommendation to the public for 60 days and at the end of that time have a public hearing.
- Built in time for public education/outreach. Brian thinks that not having public outreach/education is half the reason why 2012 attempt was voted down by the people.
- The timeline includes the first set of people to be interviewed by the study commission (see below for list).
- Wants to build in time for public comment meetings, separate from these recurring Wednesday meetings.
- Ideas for other groups be interviewed after commissioners and all involved with previous attempts to change government – these are not set in stone as there obviously may be questions that require others to be interviewed, this is just a starting point:
- Academics from the regional universities who specialize in government structure.
- The National and/or Idaho Association of Counties
- City of Coeur d’Alene managers
- Local Party Central Committees
- Deena Darrow, Kootenai County Finance Director, for cost efficiencies
Beginning list of interviewees:
- 1996 study commission
- 1996 County Commissioners
- Current County Commissioners
- 2012 County Commissioners
- Current elected officials in all other offices
Discussion around administrative functions. What constitutes administrative? What meetings would be consistently administrative that could be taken off the County Commissioners’ duties? What would a County Manager/Executive take over?
- Answer: Personnel meetings, department heads – including the role officials (other elected positions) – would report to Manager/Executive instead of directly to County Commissioners. Commissioners would fall back to only Legislative and appeals (quasi-judicial).
There’s a long discussion about this administrative topic, how many meetings are administrative, what the definition is around ‘administrative’ meetings, etc. The 350+ meetings per year that the County Commissioners attend, those are ONLY public meetings. They do not include meetings with legislators, business heads, members of the public, etc.
Tamara Bateman brings up the point that this whole discussion is around the idea that there will be a County Manager/Executive instead of looking at every alternative form for the benefit of the community, not just for the benefit of the County Commissioners. “Yes, we want to take the above information into consideration, but we don’t want to make it the entire focus of what we’re doing. It’s too specific and puts too much emphasis on the County Commissioners and it’s almost leading into the assumption that the direct result is there WILL be a County Executive or County Administrator. Which I think, if we’re trying to be transparent, those are options; those aren’t the only 2 options.”
Chair Dave Bottling doesn’t believe it’s leading into the question of they’re going to do the Executive Administrator/Manager. He’s looking at the specific questions above as that’s one of the questions they’re going to have to answer: is there a reason to offload some of the administrative work? That comes up whether we’re talking about an Executive or Administrator, 5 Commissioners, 3 commissioners with Administrative sub-committee, etc. All of it deals with how many administrative meetings can be offloaded so he thinks this specific discussion is warranted.
What are administrative functions:
- Answer, according to Chair Dave Bottling: day to day decisions and processes that keep the county running. Personnel decisions, reports from the second tier. Assuming that we’d go with an appointed position (and I’m not saying that we are, just thinking hypothetical), assuming that an elected position becomes an appointed position, that person would be reporting directly to an Administrator/Manager. As long as their elective, the amount of reporting back would be minimal, if they become appointed positions the amount of reporting back would be significant.
Current County Structure agenda item is tabled for the second week in a row to make room for more discussion around bylaws. They should be discussing this topic next week.
There was an hour-long bylaws discussion about the differences between the template that Nancy Jones sent around and an updated suggested version by Study Commissioner Bryan Cleary. Because I have neither version of the proposed bylaws, I’m going to wait until I have a final (or semi-final) version to link.
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