CC Minutes - 10/11/06 Work Session

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reminded the councilors that when anticipating the Police Auditor’s Office, the decision package had been included in his recommendations and as part of the proposed budget, though it was developed as a stand- alone decision package. Regarding the sixth motion, which directed the City Manager to assign staff to develop a plan to implement the ideas and recommendations in the report, Ms. Bettman asked if this was not redundant, given that the direction would be to move forward with the top three recommendations. She asked why staff would be taken from working on other issues when the $100,000 could be allocated toward setting up the position, a commission, and the support of those efforts. City Manager Taylor replied that he thought the recommenda- tions and the implementation strategies should be pursued sooner rather than later. He felt that waiting until it was a budget item would delay the start of the process until July 1, 2007. He said he would propose bringing someone from the environmental policy team with the current funding and then see if the council would support ongoing funding in the FY08 budget. He sought to speed up implementation activities and the staffing of the office so that it would be put into place this year and not next year. Ms. Bettman asserted that it made more sense to move forward with implementing the first three recommen- dations with the currently allocated $100,000. Ms. Taylor thanked the task force for the hard work. She expressed her enthusiasm for the work. She had hoped to adopt all of the recommendations at the present meeting. She wanted the council to decide to provide ongoing funding. She averred that the “end of life itself could happen” as a result of global warming. She would like the business community to strive for perfection in its sustainable business endeavors so that everything done was sustainable. Regarding the funding, Ms. Taylor averred that the SBI work was more important than many of the other things the City was doing. She suggested that the Police Commission could go out of existence. She felt it had served its purpose; the council could take over policy discussions about the police and the funding for the Police Commission could be reallocated to the proposed SBI commission. Mr. Poling supported the SBI recommendations and he supported getting a “jump start” on it. He stressed the importance of being fair and equitable to all businesses whether they were local businesses that had been established for a long time or new businesses to the area. He averred that there were “dynamite young businesses” in the city. He did not want to give one an advantage over another. Mr. Kelly agreed that it was important to work with all businesses at whatever level they were working toward sustainability in order to “help them up the ramp.” Mr. Kelly asserted that if the work was not funded in the budget, 90 percent of it would be “dead.” He said one of the ways the City expressed its priorities was how it set its funds. He noted that the office of sustainable development would not be “some giant organization”; rather, it would have no more than 1.5 FTE. He averred it was eminently doable. He wanted to get things started, but he thought it was inefficient to take someone who was doing other work now and reassign them. He suggested that the motion combine the intent of staff’s final motion and the issue of budget package. He wanted to use the $100,000 to post the position as soon as possible and, in the same motion, state the intent of council that the ongoing funding for the office would be in the draft budget for FY08. Additionally, he hoped the next work session on this topic would be soon. MINUTES—Eugene City Council October 11, 2006 Page 4 Work Session