City Increasingly Lax in Complying with Thursday Deadline for Council Agendas – Last year, council adopted a policy setting a Thursday noon goal for the release of the city council agenda. As time has gone on, the city has been increasingly slow in getting the meeting agendas out to the public.
This calendar year there have been eight city council meetings, and for six of those the agenda was not sent out by the city until Friday. Only for the meeting on February 12 and March 19 were the agendas received by the public on time.
But it is not just the agenda that is coming out late, it is also staff reports. At 5:40 on Tuesday evening, the council has an item on the agenda, “Workshop: Debt Financing for the Surface Water Project – An Overview.” There is no staff report available for that item.
Item 7 on the agenda is an item, “Yolo-Solano Air Quality Management District Presentation – District Activities During 2012 to Protect the Area’s Clean Air and Plans for 2013.”
Given that the presenter will be YSAQMD Executive Director Mat Ehrhardt, it seems understandable that there might not be a staff report for this item.
Less justifiable is the lack of a staff report, for the second time, for the STEAC Appeal of Planning Application. Once before, this item was agendized, no staff report emerged, and the item was ultimately continued.
Under recommendations, the staff recommendation is to open and continue public hearing to April 23, 2013.
What we do not have at this time is any description of the project. The Vanguard requested documentation nearly two weeks ago. The city quickly sent the STEAC submittal documents, however, when the Vanguard requested an external rendering of what the modular unit looks like on the exterior, the city did not have it.
As Ken Hiatt, the city’s Community Development and Sustainability Director said in response to the request, “This is all they would give us despite our request to provide better exhibits.”
It is understandable that a non-profit would be cost sensitive, but we have an issue that appears at this point in time to be one of some controversy.
As we reported last week, the Davis Downtown is a strong advocate for the project, while Old North Davis, the adjacent neighborhood to the north, is in strong opposition.
A March 15 letter from Davis Downtown Executive Director Stewart Savage, sent to Mayor Joe Krovoza and the city council, urges “the City Council and Staff to support the efforts of the Short Term Emergency Aid Committee (STEAC) to upgrade their facilities located at 508 5th Street.”
They argue, “The upgrades would allow STEAC to better fulfill its mission of providing food and clothing services to those in need by including on-site restroom facilities and laundry room.”
“The current facility is in a location where clients are able to access needed resources via bicycle, public transportation, or car pooling,” Mr. Savage writes. “The upgrades would provide an opportunity for aesthetic and architectural improvements to a highly visible property along one of our major thoroughfares and ultimately an investment in our community.”
On the other hand, in February, Steve Tracy, President of Old North Davis Neighborhood Association, wrote a letter noting that the residents have been placed “in a very awkward situation.”
“Many residents of Old North Davis have supported STEAC with our personal time, or donations of money or goods,” Mr. Tracy writes. “But we are bewildered that a good organization so dedicated to community service would attempt to do something so damaging to the surrounding neighborhood.”
“Residents of Old North Davis are appalled at the proposal by STEAC to build a massive storage shed at the corner of Fifth and D streets,” he writes. “This will be blight at first sight on a very prominent corner in a corridor soon to receive a makeover costing well over $1 million.”
It would be nice to know where staff came down on an issue that is likely to draw a number of public commenters on both sides of the issue.
Michael Bisch, co-President of the Davis Downtown, indicated in a comment last week that while the various stakeholders met last fall, they were unable to reach an agreement.
The council also seems torn on how to proceed.
Whatever side you are on regarding this issue, it seems that the council needs to set and enforce protocol for meetings. We thought this was resolved last year when the council directed staff to have meeting agendas with staff reports by noon on Thursday.
Staff, with rare exceptions, adhered that those guidelines last year. There were some tricky issues that required more thorough staff reports.
Our preference, particularly on issues that do not have firm deadlines, is if the staff is not ready to release the agenda and the staff report by noon Thursday, the item should be bumped to the next meeting.
It was one thing when you had highly technical staff reports regarding the water rates, where not only was staff working on the rates up until the last minute, but there were clear and firm deadlines for the council to act. It is another when you are dealing with the issue of STEAC – bump it to the next meeting if you do not have the material and are not ready to go.
This is not simply a matter of being nitpicky. The unavailability of the staff report means that we cannot analyze where the STEAC proposal currently stands. It also means that both the Old North Davis Neighborhood Association and Davis Downtown are on standby, not knowing what staff is recommending, not being able to follow up with staff and council prior to the meeting to address concerns and not having a sense for the preferred direction from the city.
This puts the residents and stakeholders at a decided disadvantage. Last summer, the Vanguard proposed an open government ordinance. It was our view at that time that the city needed to regard the Brown Act and Public Records Act as the minimum threshold for open government requirements.
While the proposal did not gain much traction for a variety of reasons, the Vanguard remains committed to those principles and at some point will revisit them.
—David M. Greenwald reporting
UPDATE: The city notes that their City Clerk staff is down to just one person instead of the usual three people on staff. They report that they are hoping to make hires in the near future to address this problem.
I have some fence and landscape work I am trying to get approved, and my contractor keeps apologizing for the delays saying that the city building department is under-staffed (people on vacation) and is backed-up.
This brings up an interesting topic of discussion… the historical trends for increasing vacation and holiday days. I am old enough to remember the standard two-weeks of paid vacation, and one week of use-it-or-lose it sick leave. I also got seven paid holidays. After 10 years of service, I got another week of vacation.
Sick leave was a thing rarely used. Even vacations were difficult to take without resulting in career impacts competing for promotions.
Contrast that to what we provide our public sector workers today, and it is clear that the increases in paid time off benefits are part of our budget and service delivery challenge.
I think a city worker with over 10 years of service gets five weeks of PTO and fourteen paid holidays. That totals seven full weeks of being absent from work and still being paid for it.
In a small city like ours with a small department, having one or two people out on vacation would severally impact service delivery. If the department is staffed by six people, the total paid time off equals 42 weeks… or nearly a full FTE.
As we discuss the unsustainable pension benefits committed to our public sector workers, we should also be talking about scaling back paid time off.
I didn’t get the sense this was a vacation issue.
My landscaper coveyed to me that he was told by staff that this was the cause of his delays. However, these two issues may be separate.
This kind of staff failure had a lot to do with the midnight meetings of past councils. It also dramatically affects the quality of council decision making, as well as of public participation.
Agree with your proposal to kick items automatically to the following meeting’s agenda if the packets aren’t available in time for council/public evaluation and research ahead of meetings. Partly because council members can’t talk amongst themselves outside of meetings, bad decisions get made if all of them aren’t adequately prepared individually for the meetings themselves.
There is no staff report on STEAC because tonight it will be continued to April 23 as staff continues to work with the applicant (not the appellant) on alternatives.
Re: paid time off, I believe city employees are entitled to their paid leave, which was already bsrgained for in their contracts. As a state employee, I went many years without a cost of living increase or a raise. But I stayed in my position because I enjoyed my job and it had great benefits. When employees do not get ample paid leave, workers compensation claims increase. On a personal note, the people I worked with who were the most productive, least stressed out, and most pleasant, were the ones who regularly used their vacation days.
JimmysDaughter: While you were not getting a cost of living increase, your peers in the private sector had seen their wages decrease, their share of increasing health care cost increase, and pensions were already a long gone relic of the past. Private sector employees tend to get a lot less paid time off than public sector workers… a lot less.
Check with your relatives that worked as a professional employee in the private sector a generation or two ago. Did they get six or seven weeks of paid time off? Did they get 15 paid holidays? Not even close.
In a small department, how do you compensate for those lost work days and keep up your service levels? With all our city and state’s municipal budget deficits becoming a ticking fiscal time bomb of Stockton-like results, I think this is an area to revisit.