Loading...
HomeMy WebLinkAboutCC Minutes - 09/23/09 Process Session M I N U T E S City Council McNutt Room—Eugene City Hall 777 Pearl Street—Eugene, Oregon September 23, 2009 Noon PRESENT: Alan Zelenka, Betty Taylor, Chris Pryor, George Poling, Jennifer Solomon, Andrea Ortiz, Mike Clark, George Brown, members. Her Honor Mayor Kitty Piercy convened the process session of the Eugene City Council. She reviewed and revised the order of the agenda. A. WORK SESSION: City Council Process Session Topic: Council Officer Succession Mr. Pryor observed that the current officer succession process worked one way if there was frequent turnover in councilors and another way if there were councilors who served more than one term. He wanted to ensure that there was a policy for officer succession that would not create any acrimony. He believed the current practice for rotation was unclear for councilors who had longevity on the council. Mayor Piercy thought the officers were elected on a rotation basis, with the exception of councilors who had served for less than two years. Mr. Pryor stressed that his desire was to establish a formula and avoid a “popularity contest.” Ms. Ortiz commented that she did not want to base a policy change on a situation that happened prior to her tenure on the council. City Attorney Glenn Klein stated that the council could structure the code so that it was formulaic and then if a future council did not like it, they could change it. Mayor Piercy ascertained that there was general consensus to retain the current formula. Mr. Pryor added that he also would prefer for officers not to be elected based on their political orientation. He thought it would be better to maintain a strictly formulaic approach to officer elections. Topic: Attending Council Meetings Via Conference Phone Ms. Solomon stated that there had been times when various members had attended meetings via telephone. MINUTES—City Council September 23, 2009 Page 1 She said it had been hard to hear and sometimes councilors did not mute their phones when not talking. She related that since then Mayor and Council Support Manager Beth Forrest had found a bridge line that worked better. She considered it to be very important to be present and to be selective about one’s absences. She did not want to set a limit as to how many times a councilor could participate by phone per quarter, but she wanted to strongly encourage councilors to be in attendance. Mr. Clark echoed that sentiment. Topic: Citizen Involvement Committee Mr. Zelenka recalled that when the Citizen Involvement Committee (CIC) had been disbanded by council order, the function had been delegated to the Planning Commission. He was wondering if furthering citizen input opportunities was an important enough topic to reinstate the committee. He suggested that it should meet perhaps once per quarter to discuss how to garner input from more than the people who most frequently provided public testimony. Ms. Solomon believed that the councilors did reach out to the community. She considered the council to serve as the CIC. She said if the council was going to discuss ways to reach out, then the council should engage in that conversation. She did not think the work should be passed off to another committee because that would cause more staff work, more minutes, more meeting organization, and “more cookies.” She thought technology had changed a lot since the CIC work had been delegated to the Planning Commission. There were a lot of surveys in the community and there was tremendous online access for citizens. Additionally, she pointed out that each of the councilors were out in the wards encouraging people to participate. She was not interested in reconstituting the CIC. Ms. Ortiz wondered how they would measure, if there were another CIC, whether there was more input from the community. She remembered that the CIC had not resonated in the west side; she could not recall anyone bringing it up prior to her tenure on the council. She believed that the City did a lot to garner community involvement. She agreed that it was part of the councilors’ charge to be a conduit to the community. Ms. Taylor had served as the council representative on the CIC before it had disbanded. She noted that the committee had not met every month. She related that “one good thing” about the committee was that its membership included two people from the voter pool. She averred that those people learned things about the City that they would not have learned otherwise and some of them had gone on to become involved in other things. She had thought the CIC was a good thing. She recalled that the CIC had to approve the departmen- tal advisory committees (DAC). She said if it looked like a DAC was weighted too much in one direction or if it had left out an important segment of representation, the CIC could change it. Mr. Pryor commented that he could see both sides. He was interested in how the council made good decisions and to what degree the public involvement portion could work. He shared the concern that the council did not have the best information to make informed decisions in every case. He believed that much of this had to do with which way the flow of information went. He questioned whether the public should be MINUTES—City Council September 23, 2009 Page 2 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 Assistant City Manager Sarah Medary related that a City employee was enrolled in the County’s classes. She said they had come up with an idea for a “City College” to provide this type of education for area residents. Mayor Piercy perceived that there had been a huge change in the way the City tried to garner public input and to educate the community. She cited the most recent meeting, at which a relatively broad group of people had provided testimony. She thought they should reach out for public input in “every place.” She was pleased at the work that City staff and its elected officials had been doing to increase it. Topic: Use of Council Office Space (Guidelines, Courtesies) Mr. Pryor understood that City staff could use more space. He wondered if the City Council really needed the amount of space it was allocated. He did not need a desk, though he acknowledged that some needed one. He thought this might present an opportunity to consolidate. He added that the meeting room had been invaluable to him. Mr. Brown and Ms. Ortiz indicated that they used the office and preferred to retain their desks. City Manager Jon Ruiz said no decision was warranted at this point as the need for more office space was not great at present. Mr. Zelenka stated that he used the space and he especially liked the conference room. He observed that as new councilors were elected, the use of the space would fluctuate and they could not predict who would use the City Hall office and who would use a home office. Ms. Ortiz suggested they strike the topic from the list. There were no objections to it. Topic: Meeting Safety Ms. Ortiz said she was concerned about a possible safety issue. She recalled a shooting in a council chamber in California that had happened several years earlier. While she did not believe that this would actually happen in Eugene, she wanted to be aware of this possibility. She preferred not to have a police officer present, however, and wondered if the Council Chamber was equipped with a panic button. Ms. Medary stated that some staff members present had the number for the Eugene Police Department (EPD) watch commander programmed in their cell phones. She felt that this was like having a panic button. She said when she had spoken to councilors about this concern, most indicated they did not want an officer to be tied up sitting in the room. She thought that in a situation in which they had an individual come to several council meetings who was “kind of scary,” it might be wise to increase security measures. Ms. Ortiz still felt that it would be a good idea to install a panic button that was directly linked to the 911 call center. MINUTES—City Council September 23, 2009 Page 4 Mr. Zelenka had not been very concerned about this issue until he had watched some of the recent town hall meetings and seen some of the behavior exhibited by people on “both sides of the fence.” He was not certain a panic button would work, given that the watch commander was only a short distance away. He noted that the proximity of watch command could change if the police facility moved to the Country Club Road location. He did not think they needed to have an officer present. Mr. Clark remarked that how one defined outrageous behavior might be an interesting conversation. He believed the council had seen quite a bit of outrageous behavior that matched or exceeded what they had seen on television nationally. He agreed that they needed some mechanism to address the concern, though he would not want to take police resources from active patrol. He was not concerned so much for the council as for the situation in which someone with a disorder and/or a grievance who would come into a public setting with 50 people present. He said a means to address this quickly and effectively was important. Mr. Pryor commented that everything would be fine until it was not. He recalled the school shooting that had happened in Springfield and how shocking that had been. He said the issue lay in how they should treat this “everything is fine until it is not” situation. He stated that having the watch commander a short distance away was not much different from having that person be a long way off because once someone pulled out a gun it only took seconds to cause harm. He observed that even having an officer in the room was no guarantee of a level of security. He noted that some places had installed metal detectors. He said he was not necessarily advocating for the installation of metal detectors. He thought a panic button would help to create a false sense of security, but would not actually make things more secure. He said there had been times he had felt concerned and he had been discouraged by the lack of civility he had witnessed. But he was not certain what to do about it that was reasonable, there would be no simple solution. Mr. Poling observed that a watch commander alone would not be able to mitigate an extreme situation. He shared Mr. Clark’s concern for the safety of everyone that would be attending a meeting. He was not advocating for metal detectors or uniformed officers, but he thought they needed some kind of planning. As for dangerous behavior, he had witnessed some people working themselves into a frenzy in the back of the room before they came up to speak. He believed there was only a short distance between outrageous behavior and dangerous behavior. He did not want to scare people away from the meetings or to exclude anyone, but he thought the staff needed to be aware of what was going on around them, as did the councilors. He said if one of the executive staff members saw something that did not feel right they should have the authority and responsibility to send a note up to Mr. Ruiz or to suggest that a recess be called. Ms. Taylor thought having a recess was a good idea. She added that she did not believe things had become worse. Ms. Medary suggested, as an interim step, that they invite Crime Prevention Specialist Tod Schneider to a work session and an evening meeting to assess the situation. Mayor Piercy approved of that idea and of the proposal to call a recess if a potential threat was perceived to be in the room. She related that she had experienced the first unnerving situation in her political life in the MINUTES—City Council September 23, 2009 Page 5 past year and she felt the response had been a little slow. Kristie Hammitt, Executive Director of the Central Services Department, stated that the Municipal Court had worked through a lot of these issues and had some systems in place. She said they had conducted training for the judges that could be beneficial to the councilors. Mayor Piercy said it would be good to be reminded of basic things such as getting down on the floor if a situation looked threatening. Mr. Poling remembered that the council used to always take a break during its Monday evening meetings. He did not think it would be unusual to call for a break. Topic: Consulting with Council before Authorizing a Public Opinion Poll Mr. Brown stated that they served as City Councilors and as the Urban Renewal Agency and had fiduciary responsibilities associated with this. He felt the council should have been consulted about the survey that the Urban Renewal Agency had authorized. He noted that the survey had cost $25,000. He was not concerned so much about the cost as he was that the council had not been informed. He had learned of it from a co- worker. Ms. Ortiz disagreed. She said there had been approximately a dozen polls conducted since she had begun her tenure on the City Council. She believed it was an effective way to conduct outreach. She did not want to become involved with the process at that level of detail. She had not seen the executives stray very greatly from the direction they were given. Mr. Pryor considered this to be about the interface between policy and operations. He believed that conducting a poll was a part of operations and the council was a policy body. He agreed that the council should be informed if the City or the Urban Renewal Agency had an interaction with the public, but he did not want to be involved in the design of it. Mr. Clark agreed with Mr. Pryor. He would want to know about a poll before it was administered. He recalled that he had learned from the local newspaper about one. He added his observation that sometimes subtleties drove questions in a survey. He believed it was important to clearly understand what outcome was desired before engaging in this type of outreach. Mr. Zelenka thought it was good to conduct polls. He was not in favor of requiring the council to approve of surveys, but he wanted to be able to discuss the policy. Mr. Brown did not want to micromanage the process. He believed that there had been policy implications in the Urban Renewal Agency poll and that policy implications should require council discussion. He thought the questions might have been a little different had a couple of the councilors participated in it. Ms. Taylor agreed that the council should be aware of such a survey before it happened. She expressed MINUTES—City Council September 23, 2009 Page 6 skepticism about polls. She said most people had answering machines and caller identification and would not take a call from someone they did not know. Because this would restrict who would take the call, she questioned the validity of polls. Ms. Ortiz commended Mr. Ruiz and staff for doing a good job of getting information to the council ahead of the newspapers. Mr. Ruiz said the City conducted a lot of polls and used the information “constantly.” He had thought the policy direction staff had received was to have a public process and public input. He related that, as part of following this directive, staff had engaged a company to conduct a poll. He felt that it could cause concern if the council started wordsmithing a survey because it could make the survey more political. He had no qualms about informing the council that staff would be conducting a poll. Mr. Zelenka did not think anyone was interested in wordsmithing. He added that he did not believe a poll could be unbiased because they were “always trying to get at something.” He averred that where this intersected with policy would be where it became part of the council’s purview. He thought determining what they were trying to “get at” through a survey would be a legitimate conversation to have. Topic: Process to Honor Staff and Community Members Mr. Zelenka related that he had wanted to honor some of the people from his neighborhood but he had not known how to undertake such an activity. He observed that there were a lot of “cool” things happening. He thought they should have a formal process to celebrate what the community did well. Mayor Piercy related that a lot of people requested proclamations. She said they needed to be careful not to grant this to too many people, though it would be good to find a way to honor them nonetheless. Mr. Clark agreed. He thought a process for honoring the good things would be an appropriate way to celebrate them. He noted that he kept a stack of stationery and cards in order to send people in his ward notes of congratulations, etc. Ms. Taylor observed that such things could be brought up during the ‘Items’ portion of the work sessions. Topic: Maximizing Use of Council Work Session Time Ms. Medary stated that this item had arisen from comments made during work sessions regarding the different levels of need for information different councilors had before starting a discussion on an item. She said staff also wanted feedback on the amounts of time allotted to various items and the materials provided to councilors. Mayor Piercy commented that even if she had read information and was familiar with it, there was an aspect of presentations that sought to educate the public. MINUTES—City Council September 23, 2009 Page 7 Ms. Ortiz wanted to address this topic and the next two, meeting minutes and use of new tools and technology, at the same time. She had liked that one previous meeting had been broken into a 20-minute item and a longer item for discussion. She related that a very large packet of information had been provided to councilors related to the Joint Elected Officials meeting of the previous night. She appreciated receiving smaller updates on issues to remain current. She noted that information related to planning was dense and detail-oriented and sometimes hard to digest, but was very relevant to the community. She liked the public record and the way the minutes were being processed and provided to the councilors. Regarding an email distribution list, she wondered if the City Council could create a council newsletter. She thought this would be one way to call out the contributions of members of the community as well. Mr. Zelenka also liked having shorter items mixed into the agenda. He agreed with Ms. Ortiz about receiving smaller updates. He said he would like more short meetings with the various commissions and committees that worked on City issues. He pointed out that the councilors all served on committees and commissions as well. He thought it would be beneficial if the councilors could provide some sort of report or update from them at work sessions. Mayor Piercy suggested that this could be integrated into the regular council meeting. She observed that the committees often worked on things having to do with big policy issues in the community. She thought a portion of the regular meeting could be set aside for such updates. Mr. Brown had been frustrated by the lengthy Powerpoint presentations that had been made regarding urban renewal and the police facility. He felt that not enough time had been left for discussion. He believed that all of the councilors came prepared and that by the time an item was brought back for the second time another Powerpoint presentation would not be necessary. He agreed that it was good to bring the public up to speed on the background information, but he thought that unless a Powerpoint presentation was significantly different from its first iteration they should curtail them. Mr. Ruiz commented that one reason for giving a Powerpoint presentation that had been basically provided at a previous meeting was to review information. Mayor Piercy remarked that it was a difficult balance. Ms. Solomon cited the transportation issues they had been working through and observed that every presentation had been similar but the councilors were still “asking the same questions.” She had no problem with seeing a Powerpoint presentation more than once. Mayor Piercy said the challenge lay in allowing enough time for the council to have a real conversation about an issue in addition to the information portion of the meeting. Mr. Brown remarked that he wished they could engage in more process sessions. He said when a meeting was 90 minutes long and the Powerpoint took 20 minutes of it, and councilors were only allowed to speak in three-minute bites, it impacted the time for discussion. MINUTES—City Council September 23, 2009 Page 8 Ms. Ortiz wondered how much time other city councils spent on running their cities. She asked if the council had ever re-evaluated how much time they spent on the City’s business. She averred that the Eugene public deserved as much background information as possible. Ms. Taylor recalled that work sessions used to be two hours long and agendas never included action items. Regarding Powerpoint presentations, she commented that they meant the council was reading on a screen what it would be reading in the packets. She added that she also felt hampered by the three-minute time limit. Mayor Piercy surmised that some of these issues deserved more discussion. She thanked the councilors for the good conversation and asked them to give feedback on how they would like to continue it. Mayor Piercy adjourned the Council Process Session at 1:32 p.m. The following topics were deferred for lack of time: City Council Meeting Minutes (Detailed vs. Summary vs. Video) ? New Tools/Technology for Agenda Materials, Meeting Records and Minutes, Goals and Issues ? Tracking Mayor/City Council Email Distribution List ? Inclusion of Ordinances showing Legislative/Grammatical Changes in Agenda Packets ? Respectfully submitted, Jon Ruiz, City Manager (Recorded by Ruth Atcherson) MINUTES—City Council September 23, 2009 Page 9