CC Minutes - 09/23/09 Process Session

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involved in helping councilors make decisions or involved in informing them on decisions and how this would work. He observed that there was a group of people that, for one reason or another, was the group of people they most often saw participating in the public process. He averred that this was to their credit, but it did not represent the entire community. He did not want to confuse people into thinking that they were participating in the decision-making process; they were in an advisory position only. He did not know that it would take a committee to engineer more public input, but he agreed that it would take a larger process than the one that was currently in place. Mr. Clark observed that process sessions were meetings on how to have better meetings. He felt that a CIC was a committee on how to have better committees. He agreed that the council needed a broader measure of the community values. He thought it was staff’s job to measure the community sentiment, community involvement, and community values when it was a part of what the council needed to make better decisions. He said it was their job to engage the community in the process. He was not sure they should create a committee to do so. Mr. Poling believed that they were doing a better job of getting information to the community, but the problem lay in that a lot of people would not get involved until an action would affect them specifically. He recalled complaints that the Metropolitan Wastewater Management Commission (MWMC) had received when he had served on it regarding the early morning meeting time. He related that the MWMC had responded by holding a meeting at a later time and had publicized it but only one member of the public had shown up. He also noted that the Harlow Neighborhood Association was experiencing difficulty in recruiting officers. He believed that people would not get involved “until the very last minute.” He was not in favor of adding another committee to the roster. Mr. Brown believed it was a worthy idea, but he agreed with Ms. Solomon that the councilors could attend neighborhood association meetings and work to “get the word out.” He had also witnessed that participation was low unless something specifically important was happening. He suggested that when people showed up at meetings, it presented an opportunity to encourage them to participate on boards, committees, etc. He had observed that there was a high percentage of representation from Wards 1, 2, and 3 on them. Mr. Zelenka agreed with Mr. Pryor. He said the goal would be to get more and broader input into City Council decisions. He did not think the Planning Commission was the right place to assign the work of the CIC as their workload was already great and they did not really have “ownership” of it. He commented that the department advisory committees seemed very distant from the council processes. He rarely knew what they were doing and did not see how they should impact the council decision-making process. He thought one way to address it would be to form a task force to increase citizen involvement in the short term. Ms. Taylor pointed out that not everyone had a computer or intended to purchase a computer. She said information that was available on the Web was not available to them. She opined that giving the work of the CIC to the Planning Commission was akin to eliminating it, because the Planning Commission had enough to do. She noted that the County was holding classes for people to educate them about County services. She thought the City should also hold classes about each of its departments over the course of eight or ten weeks. She averred that the more people knew about government, the less likely they were to be afraid of it. MINUTES—City Council September 23, 2009 Page 3