The record · Transcript
Council Session — 2025-08-04
Transcript from the session's official auto-captions (27,767 words), shown in readable case and split into speaker turns. Speakers are not yet identified (colors just separate consecutive turns). Auto-captions can contain errors — check the recording for anything that matters.
Session summaryEditor-reviewed
A work session of the Portland City Council convened on Monday, August 4, 2025, with all members present, including two joining online. Before formal business, a historical anniversary reflection was offered as a pre-gavel moment. The session continued a multi-part discussion on council operations, focusing this time on committee structure. Topics included whether committees should meet more or less frequently, the appropriate length of meetings, chair discretion versus prescriptive scheduling rules, and the use of co-chairs versus chairs and vice chairs. Discussion addressed the potential creation of a "committee of the whole," including questions about its formal status, ability to take action, and relationship to existing work sessions, with input from the city attorney on relevant procedural rules. Additional topics included district representation on committees, the number and naming of standing committees, alignment of committees with service areas versus broader policy topics, use of the consent and time-certain agendas, coordination with city administration staff, and the possibility of weekly council meetings. Three councilors presented written proposals for restructuring committees, and the council president indicated she would also circulate her own written thoughts. City administrator representatives and legal staff provided input on logistics, costs, and procedural options. No votes were taken on committee structure during this session; the presiding officer indicated a special meeting would be scheduled the following week to continue the discussion and potentially take action, with any votes and their outcomes to be reflected in the official vote ledger.
AI-drafted from the session's auto-captions, reviewed by an editor — describes the discussion only; recorded votes live in the vote ledger. Captions contain errors.
Procedural markers in this session
Literal phrase counts from the official captions — a measurement of procedure, not a judgment of anyone's conduct. Click a marker to highlight its occurrences below. Captions contain errors.
0 Good afternoon. It is 1:03 p.m. On. There we go. Monday, August 4th. I am calling to order a work session of the Portland city council. And for folks in the room, just to be aware. Councilors Avalos and Koyama Lane are joining us online today. So they are on. We actually have a full council for the first time in a little while, I believe. So, colleagues, we started a meeting last week to talk about our council meetings and what work we do in council meetings and what work we do in committee meetings, and what some of our priorities are for how council as a whole comes together. Today, we're going to pick up the next piece of what will probably be a three part conversation to talk about committees. So if you recall, there wasn't a strong consensus around what committees versus council does, but there was some conversation about the role that committees play and the importance of having committees to do oversight work, to become the experts on council about certain topics, both the policy work that needs to happen and also the work that's happening within our bureaus so that we can do that oversight, work well to iterate and come up with ideas that come forth to council to provide a first stop for ideas to be debated, and an additional place for the public to weigh in. We didn't get very far down thinking about what of those were the biggest priorities and where the line is. If there's a clear line between the work of committees and council. But I think there was a sense that all of those were pieces of the work that committees might do. So today, I'd like us to have a conversation that parallels the conversation we had last Wednesday a bit, but focusing not on council, but on the committee. Part of the work that we do. And I'd like us to start with some open ended questions about the role of committees and how we do the work of committees that will hopefully help us think about how many committees we realistically would like to have, and how often we'd like those committees to meet, what some of the structure of our committees might look like. We'll talk about how we might start to describe what our committees are, what priorities we have generally there. For example, are we organizing by big conversation topics, issues we want to highlight or service areas. And then we will take a break and then hear from some of our colleagues, starting with councilor Dunphy, who have put formal proposals on paper to bring forward to us. I know many of us, even if we have not put formal ideas on paper to share, have a lot of ideas around where we might go here. So we'll have a conversation about what our committees could look like. I am. I have before me the materials that we sent out last week, which I sent back out last night as well, just to give folks a place to start thinking from. And I'll run through some of those questions like we did last week, to see if there's if there are some consensus that we can find around what folks priorities are for committees. Before we do that, I was just going to ask if anybody had any questions before we start. Councilor Novick.
1 I don't have a question, but it requested a pre gavel moment to celebrate an historical anniversary.
2 I'm sorry, I thought we were doing that on Monday.
3 Or on Wednesday. Would you prefer to do it today?
4 Today is the actual anniversary.
5 Okay.
6 That's what I'd request.
7 Let's pause.
8 Then. Before we move any further, I apologize, councilor, I thought we were doing it in coordination with the council meeting and councilor Novick. Go right ahead.
9 Today is the anniversary of one of my favorite historical events in 1979. You may be familiar with the fall of the bastille in the beginning of the french revolution on July 14th. You may not be familiar with what happened on the night of August 4th. The national assembly of france, which was meeting, was consisted of three parts. There were representatives of the nobility, of the clergy and of everybody else. The third estate, and even after the bastille fell, there was significant unrest in the countryside, and some of the members of the nobility decided that to fend off unrest, they were going to propose in the national assembly renouncing some of their feudal privileges. So some of them got up at the beginning of the meeting on the night of August 4th, and started and renounced a couple of their feudal privileges. And then something very strange happened, as one of the participants said, a wave of patriotic delirium swept the chamber, and members of the nobility and the clergy got up and started renouncing privileges right and left to where one person said that it seemed like people were turning out their pockets to find privileges to renounce, and at the end of the night, the national assembly announced that the feudal regime is ended in its entirety, and the course of that evening they agreed to equality of taxation. They agreed to equality before the law. They agreed to stop selling public positions. It was a remarkable thing. It was as if in the united states, all of the hedge fund managers rose up one day and renounced the carried interest loophole. And I cannot help but be struck by the contrast between that day and what's happening in our congress today. The members, the representatives of the nobility and the clergy in the national assembly for the good of the nation and to move france towards democracy, renounce the privileges of their own classes. Now we have a congress that is abdicating its own responsibilities in order to facilitate the creation of a dictatorship. We're no longer going to have equality of taxation, because there won't be tax enforcement against the people who can hide their hide their income, although they will continue to be against those whose income is wages. We do not have equality before the law. People who commit violent acts on behalf of the ruler are pardoned and totally innocent people are persecuted through the law. We have positions being given away, maybe not directly sold, and I'm sure there's some of that. But because of adherence to the personal adherence to the ruler. So it is great to remember that people are capable of doing great unselfish things as they did on August 4th, 1789. And the contrast with what we have today is ghastly. So I want to both celebrate what the representatives of the nobility and the clergy did on August 4th, 1789, and castigate what our congress is doing today. Thank you.
10 Thank you, counselor. I think there's about 100 lessons in there for all of us to keep in mind as we do our work. And my apologies that we didn't do that right off the start. Like I said in my head, I had it down for Wednesday, but I appreciate you kicking us off that way today as we talk about how we can best serve portlanders colleagues, are there any questions about today's conversation before we jump into it? Okay, so I would love to start us off with just level setting a little bit on where folks are at right now, not jumping into what should the committees be, but thinking about how we do committee work effectively, things like do you think that it would be easier for your current committees to do their work if they met more often or for longer, or if neither would matter? Thinking about if you have in your committees a lot of overlap with other committees that we should note areas where committees have a fair amount of overlap. Thinking about given the time constraints that we have. If you think it is more important to have fewer committees that have more time to meet, more committees with less time to meet, or fewer committees with the same amount of time to meet. And we would be more disciplined or more limited in the work that we took up there. So I'd love to just give everybody a chance to weigh in on some of those more structural questions about how we want to do the work of committees before we start talking about how we decide what our committees might look like. Councilor Zimmerman, would you like to kick us off?
11 Thanks. I would happily so in terms of those questions as you posed them, I, I am not a large fan of putting rules around how committees would be structured or or or how they'll meet, because I'm a fan of discretion existing in the chair's seat and them being able to weigh the amount of work that is on their plate. I say that, you know, in the spring, I requested that finance get more meetings than is normally scheduled because of the bulk of the work. Given that season. That would be inappropriate in other parts of the year, but that was my discretion as a chair, and I was able to work with counsel ops and you to get that privilege. And I think that's the right mechanism. I've been a part of many conversations with members of this body, where there is a question about whether or not there's something to meet about, and because committee comes up, it seems a little make work. And I think make work committees is a bad, bad idea. But it has felt that way, and it certainly has existed in a number of our committees, because the day is coming up that somebody has to schedule something. And so I have not enjoyed being a member of those meetings because it's very clear when those are happening. And I also think that it has drawn out some stuff or drawn out some items that maybe could have been less amount of time in a sense of, well, because x, y, z committee meets on a certain day, we have to get something on the schedule. And I think that has got to be the wrong idea. And so I would push back there in terms of some basic scheduling and expectations that I would call it the minimum as it is outlined for us, the minimum amount of times we can meet as a council in a certain amount. I think those are important, but doing much more than that is not helpful to me, and doing much more to take away the decision making by the chair is not helpful either. And so those are the types of things I'm going to try and preserve in my voting would be preserving chair and preserving flexibility. Thanks.
12 Thank you councilor I appreciate those comments. Councilor Avalos.
13 Yeah, I have some other comments that I can share later. I just wanted to respond to that because I think it's important to note that I don't think anyone is suggesting that we have super prescriptive times, but the fact is that we have at least I'll speak for my committee. And I think this is important too. And what you're saying, right. Not all committees are the same, but we have been struggling to keep all of the things that we need to do due to the lack of time. I think all of us are struggling, okay? Not all of us. Many of us are struggling with having enough time to accomplish things. And the example that you gave, you know about the council president having discretion. My problem with that example is that I also was asking for more time and I was denied. So what is the equity and how we're making those decisions? I totally get that. That is the council president ultimately to decide. But this is about us creating more space so that we have more room for that, because I don't believe that that is all being applied equally. And my attempts and I'll bring up my ideas in a minute. I won't do it right now, but my attempt is to try to create more space so that we have a little bit more discretion as chairs of committees, for example, and just as a council, to be able to move more work, because I think we're so limited that we have to make these little decisions here and there, and they're not distributed equitably, in my opinion. So I think that we need my intention and some of the things that I'm proposing, and some of the things that I've heard from other folks, is to try to increase that and ensure that we are managing expectations and that we can all depend on having similar expectations. I get that there's always going to be discretion. I'm not against that. But my concern is that I don't believe it's been used equitably.
14 Councilor did you have anything you wanted to share about your thoughts specifically around? Kind of general approach here?
15 I'll come back to it. I'll get back in the queue.
16 Okay. Councilor Green, thanks.
17 Madam president, I just wanted to because councilor Zimmermann raised it. I, I just want to reinforce this idea that the committees should not be a space for make work. I feel that I think when my co-chair and I during the budget season, when we were thinking about our time constraints, if we did not have specific legislative items or regulatory items or hearing request items moving through our committee that were not germane to the budget, we just didn't hold those meetings because we felt like that was a better use of time. I do think it's important to provide a space to discuss things publicly and to have presentations from bureaus, but whether that's prescriptive or by force of habit, trying to avoid doing that, I think needlessly, I think we'll we'll yield benefits also for our executive side of the house, which is responding to all of our requests. And, and I think they've they've communicated that they've they've been struggling with that as well. And so I, I guess where I'm going with this, I'm envisioning, I don't think we're going to have a shortage of work as we get up to speed over the next six months to a year, because I think we're going to see a flurry of legislative items that go through our committees, especially as they are reduced in number. So I don't think there's going to be a lack of things to do. But I definitely want the freedom and the flexibility to sort of say, you know what, we're not going to have this one and that not be viewed as like, okay, we're not we're not like interested in the committee work, if that makes sense. So just wanted to weigh in there. I'll provide my $0.02.
18 Thank you. Councilor. Councilor Morillo.
19 I tend to agree that there should be flexibility. I definitely don't believe in doing work for the sake of work, or inventing work, when we already have so much on our plates. I will say maybe it's hearing that some committees don't feel like they have topics to meet on, so they're not meeting sometimes is shocking to me. As co-chair of the climate committee, for example, for climate resilience and land use. And I know that many of these proposals have shown that we that this committee is being considered for removal. And I think there are so many land use items that come up that you could hold a committee meeting multiple days a week and still not get through all of them, and then not advance climate policy on its own. So I guess I'm just saying that there are certainly some committees that I feel like we have needed every single meeting that we've had and could have maybe even used more, and I would want us to factor that into our decision making around this as well.
20 Thank you. Councilor. Councilor Novick.
21 Following up on that, I mean, as I said last week, I think that a major function of the committees is to sand some of the rough edges off of proposals that we have so that, for example, by the time a proposal of one of us gets to full council, we're not all harassed by 16 lobbyists on 24 different issues. But maybe we've got narrowed it down to eight lobbyists that meet with all of us on 12 different issues, but also to review proposals that are coming to us, or we expect to be coming to us from the executive sufficiently that we are neither. The council doesn't end up being asked to be rubber stamp for administration of initiatives, or council winds up reflexively rejecting an administrative initiative because it feels wrong. They haven't had a chance to look at it. I think that's a major function that committees play is back and forth with the executive to where we can identify areas where we want changes and have a time to time to think through it. And an example I gave last week was on the FEMA floodplain proposal. Councilor Morillo worked with the with bp's to come up with some modifications, and by the time it got to full council, the issues were significantly narrowed down. And I realized we're not supposed to talk about specific committees, but to follow up on what councilor Morillo said, the climate committee, which is met for more hours than any other committee. If you look at what council operations sent us, we have a long list that we my office passed out today of topics that land use, topics alone that will take up much of the next several months. And I don't think that the council needs to be engaged in all of these technical land use issues, but I think it's important for some council members to be familiar with them before we get there. So I think that how many committees we have and which we have should depend largely on how much work we expect to do and what's necessary to do that work. And so I kind of think that it's incumbent on all of us to say, if we're saying a committee should exist, we should be able to say, here's what we expect it to be doing. And it may be that in some cases we'd say this committee should exist, but it only needs to meet once every two months, or this committee should exist, but it needs to meet once a week during budget season, and not at all the rest of the time. So I mean, again, to quote karl marx, I think that we need to think about committees not just in the abstract, but real corporeal committees with their feet planted firmly on the solid ground. That's a different thing.
22 Thank you. Councilor. Colleagues, does anybody else want to jump in for some first thoughts? Okay. Councilor zimmermann.
23 Well, I was going to agree with much of what councilor Novick said until that last quote, which I certainly cannot be on the record saying. But we live in different worlds, Steve. So I think there's a lot in what you say. Councilor Novick that that rings true with me. And you're describing what I think is topic and workload and decision making that is based in some chair ships and the president's authority. The reason I started with my opening comments is that in the many proposals that we're starting to see kind of bubble up from the council, I am starting to sense a need by some members to write down what I would call like the nats detail in code. That seems a little prescriptive on how we're going to do our work. And so I'm I'm a big fan of certain committees are meeting less frequently because they're every couple of months or because it's budget season, and this one is going to meet more, or because land use issues or code is coming up. I think that's really important. But anything that says must meet, will meet, shall meet this often. This much really misses the mark with me. And so I want to I want to agree with you in that sense, because I think the nature of government work is that we have surge projects, and those are important to put our time around so that things don't get delayed too long. I also think that the idea of I like to judge one another on how well we do or do not gavel, so to speak. I think that the ability to convince the chair or excuse me, well, convince the chair to bring your item forward or the ability to against the council president to give your committee more time because of needs, I think is part of the skill of governing. Again, a few weeks ago, there was proposals that just kind of continue to want to bring this down to like the lowest common denominator, so that we're more emotions instead of decision makers. And I think the skill in this is important. And so equity amongst committee hours or equity amongst days of meeting really misses the mark. If that's the main, main argument for putting prescribed law into order here. Because the surges, the projects, the type of work that government is, does not require every topic to have the same amount of minutes every single week. And I think that that's a reasonable acknowledgment of the nature of our work. If we think that the president or any chair is not demonstrating their duties to be equitable amongst the need, personally unfair for reasons that make no sense to us, we have the ability now to make changes in that, and I want to respect those changes. I don't want to over prescribe. So that's kind of where I'm coming from. I, I get the sense that that this idea that all committees must be created equal and have the amount of same amount of time each week, I haven't been I haven't seen the need there, except the talking point. I'd like to see the need if it exists, but I haven't seen it yet.
24 Thank you. Councilor and. Colleagues, because this topic keeps coming up, I just will address the fact that during budget season, I did agree to some extra flexibility for our finance committee because I thought that was important to keep the budget work moving forward. And at the request of our staff, frankly, who were very overwhelmed with the amount of time we spent at the dais, I did not grant requests for more time to any other committee. It was not to play favorites or to suggest that some committees were more important, or doing a better job than anybody else, or had more important work in front of them than anybody else. I was trying to respect our staff, who were very, very overwhelmed by the amount of time that we were at the dais. And I also tried whenever there were committees that missed a session because of a holiday, to make sure that we could reschedule at a time that worked for the chairs so that nobody was losing time. So if there are issues that anybody has with how that was done, I'm happy to have those conversations offline. I hope that doesn't bog down too much of what we're doing today. That is not to say that we shouldn't discuss some committees meeting more or less than others. I think that's a really important part of the conversation that we have, because there may be the need for some ad hoc committees or committees that meet less frequently, but I just want to make sure to clear the air around why I might have said no to some committees and yes to others. Councilor Smith.
25 Thank you, madam president. I'd be supportive of keeping the current committee structure while exploring options to make the committees work better together and more efficiently and effectively, which may mean reducing the number of times that committees meet a month, and maybe going from standing committees to special committee status. I think going from eight committees to four committees is going to be too much work inside of a committee to have us sit for 5 or 6 hours. That's just not going to be prudent. But I think the other thing that would help me a lot more is if the governance committee or the city administrator would give me a list of particular of the 26 bureaus, which bureaus go through each committee, because then we could we could actually reduce the number of times that a committee goes through, like transportation and workforce and development. Well, some of those dcas have to go through 4 to 5 committees, but we could reduce which committee they went to before we actually brought it to the bid committee. So they don't have to go through all six of those. I think finance and budget is probably one of those committees that you're going to everybody's going to have to go through before they if they want money before they get to the bid committee. But I think having a list of every bureau that is supposed to go through each committee, which committees they're supposed to go through, then we have a better way of planning and a better understanding of who's actually supposed to go through each committee. Like right now, I don't know all the bureaus that are supposed to go through community and public safety other than pb in boec, but there are other places because it's called the community and public safety. So if I am given a prescribed. Opportunity to know where things are supposed to lay, then I can give you a better reading of how I want to discuss these committees. But I don't think that we need to reduce them at this point. We may need to reduce the number of times that we meet. If there's no work but a clear understanding of which committees are supposed to go, particularly for the money piece, which departments, which bureaus are supposed to go through which committee, and we could figure out how to do that.
26 Thank you, counselor, I appreciate that. That's certainly something. If we decide not to make changes that I'm happy to put together. While there are service areas that are split, I think that most bureaus there are a few exceptions do go through just just one committee or have things that go to one policy committee and then finance or governance. So we could certainly put that list together either for the current committees or if we adopt something new for the new committees.
27 Okay.
28 And I want to just clarify that issues generally just go to one committee. We haven't yet had subsequent committee meetings. We give a heads up to chairs. If there's something that might need to go to that might need to be known by multiple committees, but we just have them come before one committee on any given issue to make sure that things don't get delayed.
29 Councilor Kanal thank you, madam president, and thank you for your discussion. Questions. I want to start with responding to them. This is very related to the previous conversation. I prefer your framing from January that committees are about the big conversations that Portland needs to have, or highlighting and tackling the most pressing issues that Portland faces, as opposed to conceptualizing them as surface area based. I don't want to recreate the old form of government through this process, and as stated before, especially in the context of ways and means, I want to avoid the state legislative model. I'm also very strongly supportive of the committee of the whole. I support the portion of councilor Avalos proposal related to having a committee of the whole. I think it's also in councilor Novick proposal. I'm supportive of treating committees differently from each other. As noted, we've had subcommittees which have met 12 or 13 times, have run over time, or have packed agendas and others which have met seven. It's not the fault of either committee, it's just what the workload has been. And I think trying to schedule it flexibly in advance so that we're I think we've we've been able to accommodate changes on the fly. But to have that scheduled in advance differently might also address the make work issue that councilor Zimmermann brought up in terms of length of time. I think three hour blocks of time is preferable to more regular 1.5 hour blocks, both in terms of spending more time in district and in terms of allowing public testimony on a particularly rich conversation to get done in a single meeting. So we don't have to ask someone to wait, you know, 89 minutes before they know that they can't testify on the item and then come back in two or in a week or two. I do like the idea of having evening committees as an option, but I'd prioritize for the finite number of evening meeting slots. Having that time reserved for full council. I agree with councilor Zimmermann's point about not being prescriptive on the number of committee assignments, except for having everyone on the committee, the whole, of course. And then finally, I just want to cosign on much of councilor Novick's proposal as it relates to having co-chairs. And not just that, I think literally all but one of the points in that document that you sent out, councilor Novick, I agree with 100%. I think that co-chairs have been we've seen two. Really, I have seen two working models. I haven't seen arts and economy, so I can't speak to that one. But I think one working model in climate resilience and land use that works in one way and being part of another one in community and public safety that's different, but works well as well, has made me a strong believer in that. And I know that because we're not getting into the specific topics, I guess what I'll say is, I think the universe of topical areas that our current committees cover is the right universe. I don't see anything that needs to be explicitly removed from it or added to it. And I'm looking forward after councilor Dunphy's proposal to seeing how we can categorize that, both in terms of number of committees as well as how we can split it up. And I will leave it at that. Thank you, madam president.
30 Thank you. Councilor. Councilor Dunphy.
31 Thank you. A couple of things. First, to be directly responsive to councilor Zimmermann, I actually agree largely, I think that being overly prescriptive is the wrong direction to go, but I also still maintain that I think that committees should be a place where a vast majority of public input should be, and so they need to be reliably scheduled. I think that we need to be able to know that on a Tuesday, if I, joe citizen, want to come and talk to the housing committee that there's going to be a housing committee, I know where to go. So I think from that perspective, we need to make sure it's at least consistent, if not prescriptive. And second, just so my colleagues know ahead of while we're having this conversation, my proposal was made to have this conversation. I feel no pride of authorship of it. I look forward to people tearing it apart and proposing alternatives. I'm glad that we're having this conversation, so please don't feel worried about criticizing this, this this proposal. It was intended to be the reason we have this work session. So thank you guys.
32 Thank you. Councilor. Councilor Clark. Thank you, madam chair. Just a couple thoughts. I've gone back and forth on the number of committees. I'm becoming sort of agnostic. At first I thought, oh, let's shrink them. And I think, no, if we just use more discretion maybe on when we need to meet, we can have these committees. But I don't know how much I trust that. I do believe that the chairs have to have as much flexibility as possible. I don't want to be prescriptive. I don't like the idea of co-chairs. I think it's cumbersome, awkward. Of course, I'm not participating in that, but from afar, it just seems it doesn't seem appropriate. I think that the committees are also a place. We haven't talked very much about this for citizens to bring issues, and I think as far as transportation goes, transportation touches everyone in Portland, and we're going to see a lot more people come forward. I think with transportation issues, I'm not against aligning the committees with the service areas. It doesn't bother me at all. And I think it works really well for tea and I but, you know, one of the issues I brought up at the last meeting that I feel strongly about is getting advance notice of what the bureaus need and the flexibility as to where those issues go, because there are so many of them are going to be coming to what is really the public works committee, that if we can hand those off to the full council or deal with them in some other streamlined fashion, that would be my preference, maybe to go straight to council. I would like to hear more at some point in this conversation about this whole concept of the committee of the whole. That's not something I'm familiar with. I suppose if we shrunk the number of committees, maybe that's an important thing to do. But again, I'm I'm really agnostic on this. I think I could go either way if the committee chairs did not feel the need to just fill every hour and just to meet to meet, but I'll just leave it at that. Thanks.
33 Thank you. Councilor. Councilor Koyama Lane.
34 Thank you. Chair.
35 Really enjoying this conversation. Thank you everyone, to kind of focus on those first few questions that were presented about time. From our last conversation, I did land at a place where I like the idea that the chair can decide what the needs are of the committee. I echo what councilor Dunphy said, where we I it is important to me that it is clear to the public that there is a reliable time slot, and it's something that the committee is easy to follow along with, but I do believe it would be fine for a couple committees to decide to meet twice a month for three hours, while while another one meets weekly for an hour and a half. I do trust that a presiding officer can work with the committee and assess the needs and make the decision based on the needs of the committee. And I'll say even I think it's something that chairs will figure out. I can speak personally as figuring out being the chair of governance. I have had to kind of figure out, you know, when, when is the right time to just cancel a committee because there's too much going on or we really need to wait to get some information. And so I'll say personally, it's something that I think a presiding officer kind of has to work to and maybe learn how to do. I do feel like scheduling is important, and I want people to be able to expect a certain time. And there was one meeting where I did realize, you know, I think it's best to cancel this one. So I think it's something that it just depends. And I it's something that we'd hope that the presiding officer can figure out and have conversations and figure out what's best. I heard someone mention, and I do know that there has to be there's a piece of trust. Like, do you trust the presiding officer to do that? To be fair. And that there someone said, like, we have an ability to make changes of who that chair is. I do think it should be pretty hard to remove a chair. I think that bar needs to be really high. I'm not sure if where we're at with how that works for committees. Would love if someone knows to touch on that, but maybe that would help make some people feel better to know that there that is a possibility. I, I definitely do not want that to be an easy thing and don't want it to be a way to punish or control a presiding officer, but do hope that there's some trust that the presiding officer could could figure that out. And there could be conversations. And I have some more thoughts about the what committees we have, but I'm not sure if we're quite there yet. And I'm really interested to hear all of the different things my colleagues are sharing. Thank you.
36 Thank you, councilor, for all of those thoughts, councilor Morillo.
37 Thank you, council president. I guess I wanted to push back a little bit on the idea that co-chairs are not something that we should have. I think it depends on how different people have worked it out. I think councilor Novick and I, as co-chairs of the climate committee, have I would say sometimes we both care about climate and we have different perspectives or different audiences just based on who we are as people who we know, issues that we care about. And I think that there is a lot of richness that's brought to our committee because of our different perspectives. And I think that it gives just democracy and ideas more space to flourish. So I think that it's up to the co-chairs to figure out ways to work together, not to limit those choices. And we found ways to alternate our committee agendas. For example, there are certainly weeks where we collectively decide on, okay, some of these land use things usually are the issue that we have to work on together to make sure they get scheduled on time and whatnot, but we were able to do that just fine. So I think that people should be comfortable with the idea of sharing power together. I think that it brings a variety of voices forward in a way that we wouldn't have otherwise, and I just think it makes for richer policy development. So I'm very much in favor of that.
38 Thanks, councilor, for adding that different opinion in councilor. Koyama Lane. You're back in the queue. Okay. Councilor Avalos.
39 Sorry, I'm struggling with the buttons. All right. So I'll go ahead and share some more. Let me start by just kind of talking through what my theory of change was and what how I'm approaching it. At the end of the day, I think that good governance, it doesn't just happen. It's built, it's structural. And when we don't have these clear roles or timelines or shared processes, power is just going to flow to whoever's loudest, whoever's fastest, who's most connected. And that is not equitable. So I think that we need to define leadership. And then when we set that table leadership intentionally, we're creating more space for people to lead as well, and more ideas to be heard and more accountability to the public. I'm hoping that we can work to change and design this system, to just be more transparent and collaborative and consistent so that we can govern better, and also just that we stop reacting to crises and start shaping the future. You know, as we are, what, eight months in now, I think we've got our sea legs and it's time to, like, really start making sure that we're not feeling like everything is last minute. And I think a lot of the ideas that people have posed will start to do that. And really just moving our council away from chaos to coordination, from performative to purposeful, and making real use of the committees as well. And I think using tools like the committee of the whole, which I'll explain in a moment so that we can learn and plan together, and it just makes sure we I want to make sure everybody knows how to participate, not just the insiders. So let me talk a little bit about committee of the whole, because I know folks have been asking and it does sound a little wonky, but I think what's important about it is that committee of the whole is when all councilors can meet together outside of formal hearings, to dig into big picture or cross-cutting issues. So it's more flexible, it's more conversational, and it's more transparent than our typical council meetings. I really think of it like essentially a standing work session time. But and there's some questions that I'll have for robert to around, like could a committee of the whole, like have voting power? It's debatable. There's some nuance there. So I'm not sure how we would go about that. But despite the voting powers of a committee of the whole, I think having everybody in one place and being able to talk about more strategy things is the ultimate goal. This is a dedicated time for council to learn together as well. Stay ahead of the issues, not reacting last minute. It's where we can hear from the bureaus and preview upcoming legislation and make sure that every councilor, regardless of what committee you're on, is included in the citywide decision making stuff. So that's why I say that committee of the whole would have things like governance and finance and those things that we all want to make sure to weigh in on. And it's not niche. These are, you know, cities like albuquerque, redmond, minneapolis, even congress. They use committee of the whole to coordinate across departments and improve how they govern. So this is just about strengthening council's ability to lead with clarity and equity, and also for the public to see how decisions are being shaped, not just what gets voted on in the end. And I want to say, before I tell you a little bit more about the rest of my proposal, I think where I'm coming from is I really the two main outcomes that I'm personally seeking is that we establish this committee of the whole, I feel really strongly about it, but also that we have a leadership team. And then because I care so much about having a leadership team, that affects how I feel about how many committees there are, that affects how I feel about co-chairs versus vice chairs. I think, you know, there are very reasonable. Reasons or I don't know, for why you should have a co-chair structure versus a chair vice chair structure. But what I'm thinking about, because my end goal is having a leadership team that can be more streamlined, then that team has to be less than seven councilors. So if you put co-chairs in there, then that creates role confusion. It would it would affect quorum and I that's that's a big motivation for why I feel strongly about having chairs and vice chairs. And it's why I detailed in my plan like why what I think vice chairs could do, so that they also have some structure, because I get that vice chairs are kind of like, you know, if we don't define them, then everybody uses them differently. And then that doesn't feel like a position of power that I believe it could be. Right. So those that I wanted to state that those are kind of my two goals. And so when I look at like all of the committee proposals and all of that, you know, I'm really flexible on a lot of that. I really like how you structured it. Councilor Novick and your committees. I'm open to that. But for me to hit those two goals, that's always kind of what is in the back of my mind. Ultimately, the last few things that I'll say, I did structure it in my idea as being more around the service areas because, again, I think having less committees, more time to be in them and then having that leadership team, I think will all, you know, I think it'll all even out. I think, you know, definitely I want committee chairs to have the ability to decide, you know, if they're going to cancel a meeting or whatever. I just want to make sure that we're building in enough time. And this is also the capacity building we've been talking about, like, what do we need from council clerk office? What do we need from staff to be able to accomplish these things? Right. So that's the conversation that I'm having when I'm or when I'm thinking about when I'm talking about having more meeting time. And then also I the way I structured it is that, you know, if wednesdays are going to be council day, it seems like a lot of people are moving that direction. Then I think that, you know, we'll have the morning council in the evening council on alternate weeks. But I think in the middle of that day that 2 to 5 block is where I think we should reserve for committee of the whole. And it could be work session or it could be executive session. And then keeping that Thursday time of 2 to 5, that could also be overflow for council and or work sessions or exec sessions in the document that I shared ahead of time and is also on the website for folks watching online, you can take a look. I talk about the ways that I think vice chairs could lead. And one particular note, and I saw in your proposal, councilor Novick, that you felt that the council president should be the chair of the committee of the whole. Again, I'm open to that. I totally get that perspective. I think wanting to have the vice president be the chair just is to allow for some more leadership opportunity. And I think the vice chair of the committee, the whole could be the budget lead. I think they could take on the financial, you know, essentially what a finance chair does. Now, if we're going to fold that all into committee of the whole, I think that the vice chair could take that leadership. I also think vice chairs could do things that are, you know, whether it's chairing a temporary work group or taking on taking the lead on like a subtopic of the committee or being a liaison to external stakeholders, being the person that coordinates public engagement or someone that tracks implementation and policy follow up. Those are just some ideas for how we could make those roles more meaningful. And then by having the leadership team, I think we'll be able to coordinate better the structure and agendas of the committee so that we're getting past all of this feeling of, you know, last minute, you know, feeling especially like some of the committees, as folks have mentioned, like, we'll just get kind of get plopped these things on us, like, you got to approve these land use things, you got to approve these code changes. And they happen so quickly. And that feels when we're already with limited time and resources, it's really hard to get all the other things accomplished. So I'm trying to move some of those administrative things, some of those big picture things into what a committee of the whole would do and what a leadership team would do. That's all for now. Thanks.
40 Thank you. Councilor. I'm going to make sure everybody who hasn't had a chance to speak or has only spoken once speaks. And then we'll go back to folks who have already spoken twice, councilor Novick.
41 Yeah, a few random comments. One. We passed out the Novick proposal, which unfortunately I forgot to label the Novick proposal. But it has, it has it has blue blue ink on it. But one of the things that's attached to it is a list of how many committees comparable cities have. And actually of the cities we looked at, all of them had at least five standing committees. So it's not like we're an outlier not having only 3 or 4. I also wanted to third what councilor Kanal and councilor Morillo said about having co-chairs. I think having co-chairs not only means we bring different perspectives to the committee, but also I think that I do a better job forming one good meeting a month that I would try to do two. And I think that sharing responsibility is good, and also sharing responsibility for just having the gavel and having to deal with that is good. So I really like having co-chairs. I think that in terms of a leadership team, it does complicated a bit. My proposal, which I just realized, you know, doesn't really have deliberately excludes the vice president, suggests that we have a leadership team that includes the council president plus. And I think we should alternate who from of the of the co-chairs of committees are on it because I think the primary purpose of the leadership team meeting is to know what each other is doing, and each co-chair will know that as well as the other one. And frankly, I don't know from that perspective, it makes any difference whether the council president is always part of it, or if half the time the vice president is part of it. Because again, the point is the facilitation of transmission of information.
42 Thank you. Councilor, I'm going to jump in here with just some thoughts of my own. One of the questions that I've asked a number of folks that I think will talk about more as we move into the later parts of our meeting is how we should think about structuring committees. But because councilor Kanal brought that up, I'll mention it as well. I, I have had a number of folks propose different ideas to me there. Should they be organized by service area? Should they be organized based on the issues we want to elevate to the public? Should it be organized by how much work there is? And I do continue to come back to you as I did when I first brought a proposal to folks in the winter. I guess that was about committees that we should think about what the big conversations are that we need to have, and make sure that we have all of the elements in one place to allow us to have those big conversations. I know that's a principle that not everybody will agree with, but it's something that I continue to come back to. I do think that longer blocks of times for committees would be helpful. I've seen a number of committees have to cut off discussions in order to have time for public testimony, or cut off public testimony in order to have time for discussion. And if we come down to trying to figure out how to use a limited amount of hours, I would propose that we toward longer blocks of time and meeting less often rather than the opposite. I think that having a leadership team, which is something that a few folks have brought up, would be really helpful. I don't know that we should necessarily say that that has to happen, or that the number of committees we have in the future has to allow us to do that. But I know that as your council president today, if I were bringing a proposal forward to all of you, I would certainly make sure that we had either four committees. If the either four committees or if the council vice president is chairing a committee, up to five committees to make sure that the president and vice president and committee chairs could all meet regularly again in order to have flexibility. I don't know that I would write that down as a must do, but it's certainly what I would like to get to as we move forward or at some point in the future having done this role. Without that, I think it would be a lot easier to have. I continue to be open to vice chairs versus co-chairs in the future. As we think about the needs of council, I think if I were bringing a proposal to us right now, I would have chairs and vice chairs. I would not have co-chairs. But again, I don't think we should write that down as a must do because we don't know what our needs will be in the future. I also think that we should allow for ad hoc or temporary committees to be formed as needed. In general, I think those committees should probably be smaller than our standing committees, but if we would like to have some sort of ad hoc committee that is focused on a specific, narrow issue that we need to tackle over a short period of time, or that brings together members of two different committees that are working on overlapping issues to coordinate that work. I think having ad hoc committees with 3 or 4 people on them, temporary committees, is a really important tool that we haven't used, but that we should make sure whatever we pass in the future allows us to use. Right now we have so many committees that I haven't wanted to do that. But if we have a world with fewer committees, that could be important. I do think that flexibility, as I have alluded to, is really important, and having an understanding of culturally where we want to be, but not having to write everything down gives future councils, future council leadership, and also ourselves in the future, more flexibility to figure out what we need. And I want to empower committee chairs to have flexibility to do their work. We need to have blocks of time set aside for everybody, obviously, so that there's consistent scheduling. But committee chairs should be empowered to use those blocks of time as needed or not, and in the ways that they need. Presuming that there's transparency around what everybody's doing, which is what those leadership meetings are good for, I know we'll have conversation later about the committee of the whole, but I'll just note that I think that a lot of the work that's being suggested for the committee of the whole we do in work sessions already, I think we can pull out cities that have it and cities that don't have it, and point to both that are similar to us. And what I have heard from many people is that committees of the whole are important, where you don't have another way to have flexible conversations. We run more casual council meetings than some other cities do. We have work sessions like this session today, where we're able to have conversations about important things that we all need to be together on. And frankly, at the end of the day, I trust you all to have conversations that I'm not a part of. And even if I have different constituents and different values to air important issues, and I trust chairs in different committees to. Respect my position as a fellow councilor and let me bring forward amendments. If I have things I'd like to bring forward to those committees. So I don't feel like we need to bring all of the conversations about how the city works to a committee of the whole, especially at a time when we're all trying to figure out how we carve out time and district and time for constituent meetings, and time for everything else we want to do and time for our committees. So having a committee where we all sit separate from council that meets regularly seems like it moves in the opposite direction of where I'm hoping we go, which is being able to use our time as effectively and efficiently as possible at the dais, so that we can have more time for all of those other things that I know. Many of you have told me you want to prioritize, as well as our time up here. I don't see a need so far from what I've heard from our colleagues for committee of the whole, and I worry about the use of time. So I'll just note that as well. Councilor Ryan, I don't believe you've gotten to speak yet.
43 Thank you, madam president. Yeah. That's true. I know a little surprising. I wanted to start off by saying that I mentioned this last week, and I'm not going to put you on. Well, I am going to put you on the spot. Michael jordan, I think that what's missing for me is you and your team of deputy city administrators taking a breath with us and helping with this reset after the first six months and giving us some candid feedback on what's working, what's not. We are in a with relationship, obviously, with those public servants that implement the work for the people who live and work and play in this city. And I think if it just stays isolated between us about what works for us is fine. But I think that when we bring you and your team in, it allows us to be more mindful of the bigger picture. So I hope before we land this, we get some concrete feedback and I hope that can be worked into this process. And maybe I'm the only one that wants that. And I hope that people can tell me that. If that's true.
44 I'm hoping that mr. Jordan will provide us some thoughts a little later in the meeting today.
45 Number two is I'm looking for I'm looking for more opportunity to be out in the community, not less. And in the last form of government, that was really difficult because of the administrative role, the executive role. And it was painful at times because you just didn't have enough time in the day to do that. I ran again because I enjoy actually listening to people who don't have time to come to city hall, that don't have time to formally lobby, and it feels like we're moving more towards old government than in the last one, where there's more lobbying, there's more more meetings that are with special interests, and I'm stubbornly carving that out. But I worry that if we have more set meetings, it's going to be more challenging to do that. And so that's one of my concerns. If we're going to go to weekly meetings, council meetings, which I think does provide consistency. And I do think your average person looks at the consistency of the regular council meetings first and foremost. And I think it's smart to take to consider that. But if we do, and I see a couple of the proposals lean towards this, I will be very much focused on the efficiency of time for us and not having as many committees and as many minutes tied up in committee meetings. If we do add that to the weekly meetings for the council. So a proponent for less meetings, I think those are the points that I wanted to land right at this moment. Thank you.
46 Thank you. Councilor. Councilor Clark.
47 Thank you, madam chair. I just want to take a slightly different tack and just ask. Ask us to think very, very simplistically about what we're really here for and how does that affect our decisions on committees. And, madam chair, you mentioned strategic areas. And councilor Ryan, building off of some of his observations. What are our basic functions? What are we really here to do? Right. And you know, there's a there's a short list of those things. You know, the making sure we have clean water, making sure our sewage is disposed of appropriately, making sure that we are we all feel safe, that we have a safe community. And then you can build off of that. What's the second tier of strategic issues? What do we do to support our economy, to keep this place, you know, going? But really, where do we spread? Where do we spend public dollars? What is the most important things that the functions that we do and maybe back into the committee structure using those thoughts? What are the big strategic areas that we need to be focused on? What's most important for us? I would just offer that up as a different way of thinking about our committee structure is what what is what are we really here to do? What what what is governance for the city? And we really haven't had much of that conversation here, whether privately or together. And maybe we'll have it in the future. But we haven't really talked about our our strategy here. Why are we here? What are we supposed to be doing. And, you know, it's a it's a pretty short list. And then you can start adding on from there. But I just want to throw that out for people's thinking.
48 Thank you councilor. I really appreciate that perspective. Councilor Dunphy.
49 Thank you. I just wanted to make one quick observation about the need for a committee of the whole versus a work session. The big difference there for me is just a public testimony. Public is not allowed to testify at work sessions. And I think that there are situations in which this group needs to have a less formal conversation. I'm thinking budget. I'm thinking our own governing rules, and I'm even thinking about committee appointments to the housing committee or whatever, you know, different not our committees, but like citizen committees, situations in which all of us are going to have an opinion. We are seeing that those things are taking our time on the main council meetings that could be resolved by having everybody get input early, and we could still have continued public testimony. The alternative could be that we start allowing testimony at certain work sessions, and that might be also okay. But I think that all 12 of us need to have a spot to be able to less formally. You're right, we do run less formal city council meetings anyway. But to be a little bit more conversational about certain issues, especially around the budget, when it when we come around to it again and continue to get that public feedback. So that is the solution that I was trying to solve for. If we change our work session rules, then great, that's that solves that.
50 So thank you, councilor. Councilor canal.
51 Thank you, madam president. I'm actually going to start with a question for you. And it's about the same topic that councilor Dunphy just mentioned. I'm open to the idea of a committee of the whole not being necessary. If we have work sessions that fit that need. Let me ask you if your intention was to use work sessions for the purposes that have been listed in these proposals, or if you would still want limited membership, finance and governance committees.
52 I may not have said this specifically enough, and I apologize. I'm okay with trusting our colleagues to do some of the work, and right now, those are committees that I sit on. But I trust all of you to do the policy work on committees that I don't sit on in the future when I'm not on those committees and sitting on different committees, I'll trust my colleagues to do that work. I'm okay with having those things done by committees that don't include everybody, because I know that we are all trying to carve out time for other things, and if we have that work, go to a committee of the whole, it doesn't matter if it's committee of the whole or if it's a work session. That's all 12 of us taking on issues instead of trying to make sure that we have some of us working on other issues in community, doing the other things that we have on our plate. So I, I was not considering moving those to work sessions. I was considering continuing to address as many topics as we can in committee.
53 Thank you for clarifying. So I'll just say from an efficiency perspective, I didn't explicitly say this in the last work session, but when councilor Avalos presented the idea of a committee of the whole, she specifically mentioned the idea that appointments could be considered there. As someone who has committed to removing all appointments from the consent agenda, I would be comfortable having 95% of the appointments be discussed in a committee of the whole, and not feeling the need to do that at a full council meeting. I think there are probably 5% that would matter. So that might assist in people's evaluation of the efficiency questions around a committee of the whole. And I'll also second councilor Dunphy's point about public testimony. Three other quick notes. I agree completely with councilor Ryan about the need to preserve district time. I also think that the approach that councilor Ryan mentioned has been mine as well, which is starting by figuring out the council and the legislative role we have, and then building a committee structure and timing that works to serve that as opposed to the other way around. And relatedly, I want to do the same thing by starting with the council, then moving to committees and then building if there is to be an executive team, something like that, as opposed to structuring committees, as the council president mentioned it, in a way that serves a conceptual executive team. And to that end, I think the way that we thread that needle is what councilor Novick said, where co-chairs would alternate. And that way it kind of mitigates the conversation or mitigates the concern in this conversation. Finally, I while I did say earlier and I still stand by less prescriptiveness being good, there is one specific thing I would like to write down, which is district representation on all committees. I think this opportunity gives this. This timing gives us the opportunity to address that concern. I'll remind everyone there is nobody from district three on the arts and economy committee. Presently, there's nobody from district two on the transportation and infrastructure committee. And again, we have the second highest number of traffic deaths in our district. And I think potentially, most obviously, there's nobody from the district that includes the cei hub, district four on the climate resilience and land use committee. So I think there are opportunities to fix that here. And I think I have faith that we will do so. But I wanted to mention that in the context of really being open to writing that one piece down, that if there's at least four people on a committee, and I think we're moving to 4 to 6 being our our default, I think not moving to we already have that having district representation be a requirement to me seems like a good fit. Thank you.
54 Thank you councilor, councilor Zimmermann and Novick I promise I do see you. We just have a lot of folks who have only spoken once. We'll get back to you, I promise, councilor Green.
55 Thank you. I'm going to use Steve Novick method of historical materialism to just sort of say that I went into this thinking a little bit differently about the committee, the whole I thought we really, really needed it. But in kind of reacting to the conversation, I do think that if we just had a standing work session where we consider the items, that would probably for council that week, and then we added in it some public comment that would scratch it for me. I mean, that would deal with the issues that I think the committee want was going to solve for me. And as councilor Kanal put it, if we can have those appointments considered in there, then there's a world in which we can put them on the consent agenda, which I would prefer. So I would just like to get to a point where we can get to that place, and that would be a pretty good win for me. And, you know, I, I think the co-chair model is pretty workable. So that's it. But history keeps moving in a wheel, so who knows what I'll say next.
56 Thank you. Councilor, councilor Koyama Lane.
57 Thank you.
58 I, I liked what councilor Clark mentioned about thinking high level to help shape some of our conversations, to get on the same page. What is the point of fill in the blank full council meetings, committee meetings, work sessions, or committee of the whole? I think that can help make sure we're on the same page to tap back into talking about time, schedule, cadence. I like the idea of there being a schedule and in general like it. I believe that it's going to be easier to cancel a meeting or push something to another meeting rather than trying to reschedule. I think we've all seen how hard it can be to get meetings on our schedule. The piece I want to bring up, which I haven't really heard, is I do think having a weekly option for committees is something that I, I do care about that being an option because I don't want to undermine committees. And that can go back to the conversation that councilor Clark was bringing up. And we can talk about what is the point of committees if items have to flow through every through committees, how is that going to work if that's just happening twice a month? But we're having full council meetings, possibly weekly. I just want us to come back to that. And that is a reason why I'm not jumping on board quite yet with the idea of committees meeting, all committees meeting for three hours, twice a month. I think the number of committees and this idea of co-chairs versus chairs and vice chairs. It kind of it does. It depends for me. And I am listening quite a bit. I, I care more or not more, but I think the idea of a leadership team does inform some of that. And where I'm going to stand on those questions or on, yeah, those decisions, terms of co-chairs versus chairs and vice chairs. I'll say co-chairs probably align more with my style and values, and maybe what I think, you know, might produce some really great outcomes, because you have to have find consensus and push and pull. I do worry a bit that co-chairs might be messier, harder, a little bit trickier. That doesn't mean I'm opposed to them. I do think having some some clarity, and especially if there is, hopefully this will inform a leadership team that can help support council leadership. I do worry that it leaves room for some messiness in terms of who's part of that. And it does depend on the team, if they are, how well they're working together, who's willing to give if they're able to find consensus in terms of committee of the whole I if there's another way to have a standing work session that meets a lot of these goals, same goals, I think that is great. I'll say, as chair of governance, there are many times where there are councilors who are not on the governance committee, but really want to be included in that discussion. And I, I do hear and see that being able to have a chance to include councilors that are not on that committee oftentimes makes sense because governance, what we decide in governance does really touch how how a lot of things are flowing for many councilors. I think that's it for now. Thank you.
59 Thank you, councilor, councilor Smith.
60 Thank you, madam president. I'm trying to understand having a committee of the whole. Why wouldn't we just have a regular council meeting instead every week? I wasn't here last week, so I didn't get a chance to talk about it, but I would much rather have a council meeting. And I'd also like to be able to ask robert taylor a question. If we're having a committee of the whole, wouldn't that actually, because we'll have seven of us, more than seven of us here, it would be that we could actually do policy business if we had a committee of the whole, wouldn't that end up being a council meeting?
61 Mr. Taylor, would you like to respond to that? Thank you for being here today.
62 Hi.
63 For the record, robert taylor, city attorney. Great conversation on the committee of the whole in particular. So in robert's rules of order, if you're looking at this version, it's section 52 and it discusses what the committee of the whole is and how it works. There's robert's identifies three different types of committee of the whole. And it describes how that each type is well suited for legislative bodies of a certain size. And so there's a formal committee of the whole that is suited for really large assemblies. So 500 people, for example. Then the next level is what's called the quasi committee of the whole. And robert says that is suited for mid-size assemblies. So 50 to 100 people. And then the third category is what robert's calls informal consideration, and recommends that for smaller assemblies and under and you can decide in your rules what type of committee of the whole you want to have operating. If you want one at all. But in an informal committee of the whole, which is what robert's would recommend for a small legislative body, it essentially allows you to have a discussion without the limitations on debate. And, and in an informal committee of the whole, the action that that you take in that informal committee of the whole serves as the action of the legislative body. If you instead adopt a more formal committee of the whole, then under robert's, you would meet as the committee of the whole. Have your discussion without the limitations on debate. That committee of the whole could, for example, make an amendment to something, but then it has to go back to the full council again to actually take that action. So I just I wanted to direct you to that section of robert's rules so you could review that, really study the differences in the three types of committees of the whole, and maybe think about which would be best suited to this council. And, you know, if you if you want to go down that road of having a committee of the whole, which you certainly can just think about, how formal do you want it to be or do you want to do something more informal?
64 So the question that I had so it is not a city council meeting.
65 It it if you meet as an informal committee of the whole, it would effectively be the same as a city council meeting. You're just meeting and discussing without the limits of debate.
66 Okay. And so I guess that's what what I was saying, I, I would much rather have a city council meeting because I think we need to have a city council meeting every single week, and we can actually have an additional evening meeting, but we have to meet every week because I think what we're doing is we're we're getting real fancy with things that we should be adding to our way, that we do business. And I think we need to keep it simple, and we need to just need to add weekly city council meetings. That's my opinion.
67 Thank you. Councilor, councilor Ryan.
68 Thank you, madam chair. I forgot to say last time that I'm good with the co chair experience I'm having. I think councilor Green and I. It's pretty obvious we don't always land on the same page. I think to some and especially on the, on the economy. And yet we experience what I think is healthy for democracy. We work things out often in our planning sessions. We do share leadership. And so we come up with an agenda that I think expands many of the thoughts on this council. So I think if you lean into it, it's actually really helpful. And I think we allow ourselves to actually save some time by doing that because we work it out, you and I, before we bring it to the committee, I also have I'm not a co-chair with the vice chair and governance, but madam vice chair has a style that allows it to have that same shared leadership. So I do get a little confused when it feels like there's a co-chair where this is their meeting. Oh, and then next it's their meeting, the next one. And that as a member of the committee who doesn't want to be in leadership and doesn't want to set the agenda, it is a little I don't know it. It doesn't flow as easily as when I think it's a co-chair model where it does feel like it's a collaborative, shared agenda. So I wanted to say that to councilor Clark's comments. Thank you. I was saying that last week and no one said anything, so I wanted to since you said it, I wanted to say something about strategy. I just keep thinking, what if this council, the mayor and the city administrator team got together and we all came up with a shared agenda about the top three priorities facing our city? What if we then within each each of those top three four will say we actually have three goals and we all got on the same page about those three goals are and then imagine the world where then we decided there would be at least five measurable goals for each of those goals. I really think the public would appreciate that, because what the public's experiencing by local government, state government, I won't even touch feds. It's a lack of understanding that we're actually reading the room, and we're we're addressing this crisis with some action that we're all on the same page about. Will there be a lot of tension and debate? Absolutely. But could we at least get on the same page about what those shared goals are and then go from there? So I hope that in this process and in this reset, we actually go higher up. And then that would then organically dictate good word, inspired, better word, what the agendas would be for those committees. Because in fact, we had that type of debate to focus on what this city needs at this time. So I'm just hoping that we can move towards that type of government locally. Thanks.
69 Thank you, councilor, councilor Zimmermann, thanks.
70 I put my hand up about 45 minutes ago just to because of the way our conversation was going to agree with the point that councilor Dunphy made in respect to. We were having a discussion about whether or not committees should be prescribed every day or not, or, you know, every week or not. And councilor Dunphy brought up, you know, the public should have an expectation that certain committees are going to be held, because if we do move to a point where that is the public information or public testimony time, if you've got the pothole that you want to come tell transportation about, you need to know that that's going to meet. So I want to I want to acknowledge that because I would agree to an extent. But we haven't done is figure out where we want that testimony to exist yet. If we go down that path, I'm I'm there, but I want to use the example of just trying to acknowledge that point 45 minutes ago. This is one of the weaknesses of a committee of the whole, because now 13 different topics worthy of discussion have come up as we have to go around and be fair and do all that piece of it. And so I just like it's not right. It's not wrong, but it's a challenge of what is the point of a committee of the whole. The point sounds like it's to talk about a topic that came up 45 minutes ago, which is not great for like the bubbling, like, where do we want to go and get to a solution? Let's put that topic to bed next. Right. So that's a challenge. So I would just say that committee of the whole sounds really good on some paper. Obviously somebody sent it to a lot of people because it became the topic du jour. But I don't think it's the fix all. I do really appreciate the different varieties that were brought up. I also, you know, predictability in what councilor Smith was saying is really important to me. Keeping it simple, the county tuesdays work sessions, thursdays county board of commissioner Meetings. It only changes a few weeks during the budget season for them. So that predictability is very important. Some of us have brought up some different cities in the models that they use. I just want to. It is not an apples to apples comparison. I want to use the city of milwaukee, for instance, not our neighbor milwaukee, but the milwaukee. I think it was that they have 13 standing committees. Somebody put that. They also don't meet the way we're meeting. Right. I went and visited milwaukee with two of the previous city commissioners and many members of the of the Portland delegation for the best practices trip. If you walk into their city chambers, it doesn't look like this. In fact, some of us asked the transition team not to set this up to look like this, instead, to look more like a mini legislature where council members sit in the in the chambers at their little desks and they're recognized by the president in the way you might expect in in other legislative bodies. The reason that works to have so many committees is because then those committees are the only place where you have public interaction. And if you have a pothole, you go to the transportation committee. If you need to talk about your park, you go to that parks committee. And so it's not necessarily an apples to apples, because in that the structure and the system has sent a very clear message to the public for where you interact on what topic and how you interact on with your whether it's your alderman, your councilor, your, your committees. So I would just caution on some of those comparisons because of such differences in the midwest and the east coast model versus the west coast model, which all look like this one big dais. Going down the lot, I, I know that councilor Canal you really care about all reps on all committees. I, I just do not I, I like being able to look to other committees where we've got some expertise or frankly, I think being on a committee matters for having some. Either expertise or, or or interest in a topic. But just because nobody from our district is sitting on the climate committee doesn't mean that district four has abdicated its responsibilities. So I just don't take as serious of a concern about that. And it certainly isn't something that I would support being written down. I have been surprised by some members agreement or or fairly positive feeling about being a co-chair. I want to speak from being a member on a committee that has co-chairs. I very much dislike it. I don't like knowing the not knowing what flavor of committee I'm walking into each day, and I have noticed a difference between co-chairs and how our public interaction occurs. I think accountability is very important, and I think that the co-chair model has allowed us to pass the buck at different times for the way work is happening at a committee. So as a member of it, I very much dislike being on a on a committee that has co-chairs instead of a single chair. So I just want to state that. But I am hearing that there are others that that like it. And that's quite surprising actually to me. And lastly, just to the points that councilors Ryan and councilor Clark made. I have to deeply agree about what is the role. And there's at least one proposal out here that I am sensing that is coming from a position of we're not doing our work unless we're in these chairs, and that I really push back on this idea that unless we are in more committee time, more council time is not the whole of my job as a councilor. And I have been outspoken about this council, the largest city in the state should meet every single week. It should be predictable. But there was a proposal discussed earlier that I just it sounds like the only thing coming out of that that makes makes up the role of city councilor is whether or not you are in committee or in council or in committee of the whole. And I just have to just strongly disagree with that, with that idea. But I appreciate for those of you who took some time describing how you've envisioned council, the whole committee of the whole, because I had similar questions about work session, how we don't we have that if there's a small tweak that can be made, I'm probably open to that idea more than creating a whole new thing, because I think we are really dipping into the overcomplicating area now at this point. And this I keep hearing that this new form of government was supposed to be more transparent, and it is becoming, I think, more difficult to follow. And there's a lot with the transition and the, the charter commission that we have to figure out. But let's not make it more difficult.
71 Thank you. Councilor. Councilor Novick.
72 Two quick responses. One in response to councilor Clark, I actually don't think that it's easy to narrow down the important things to 2 or 3 things. And if you did, I think that you'd have to say that each of those 2 or 3 things has 10 or 15 important subparts, like one example of something that's important to all of us that I don't know, that would rise to anybody's list of like the top three things you'd worry about is the sci hub and what what decisions should be made about that, what land use decisions we make about that, to what extent we need to follow what's going on in state government about it. And I think that having a committee, for example, that has space to think a lot about the sci is important. I also just wanted to say that I do not agree that we should move towards a model of having fewer meetings of longer duration. I think that once you get past a couple of hours, people tend to lose their edge. I think there's some instances where we need to have public testimony on something. So maybe after an hour and a half of. Committee work before public testimony, then we have an hour and a half of public testimony. But as a general thing, actually, councilor Koyama Lane, I'd appreciate your input on this. How long do you think a human being should be asked to sit and think about the same topic in one sitting as a teacher?
73 Let's think for a second and I'll get back to you.
74 Thanks.
75 Thank you, councilor, councilor Smith. Councilor Smith stepped out. I apologize, councilor Dunphy. Go right ahead.
76 Great. Thank you. So I want to just talk about the issue of co-chairs versus vice chairs. I personally have some real concerns with co-chairs, as, as councilor Zimmerman was saying as well. I just I don't think I think it's great to agenda share, to strategically work with a colleague to. And I think it's really important to have somebody on hand to govern a committee in the place of an absence. I'm going to emulate councilor Novick a bit and do a an unrelated media quote, but my thoughts are really embodied by a quote from oscar martinez from season six, episode three of the office, where he said, look, it doesn't take a genius to know that any organization thrives when it has two leaders. Go ahead. Name a country that doesn't have two presidents, a boat that sets sail without two captains. Where would catholicism be without the pope's? I also want to be really mindful of the quorum issues. If I'm interpreting rules correctly. Having co-chairs would inherently prohibit a leadership team because of our sequential meeting laws and our committee quorum laws. And for me, I think we have to have an arrangement in which the council president, the council vice president and the chairs of policy committees can strategize, can coordinate and organize. I think much of the challenges had as a body is that we can't have those organizing meetings outside of this large group on tv in front of the public. And I think that there are some basic organizing that needs to happen in order to actually realize the power of having a council president and a council vice president. So those are my concerns. I do think we need to have vice chairs. I do think it is incumbent on a chair to include their vice chair in in setting agendas. And as I said, having somebody there in case of an absence. But I think that if everybody's a leader, then nobody's a leader. And we need some leadership as a body.
77 Thank you, councilor, councilor Smith.
78 Thank you, madam president. I do believe that we need to have vice vice chair. I think that works with our workforce and labor. Committee. And again, I'm just still pushing for an extra city council meeting.
79 And councilor We did last week talk about that. And while we were in a work session, so there weren't any decisions made, I think that there was a lot of agreement around that topic, though perhaps not agreement on how we schedule that. And the debate between morning versus evening meetings was was extensive. Councilor canal.
80 Yes. Thank you, madam president. Just to add to that, as a follow up on the last work session, I have drafted some amendments. I'll be filing those later today to that just to reflect our conversation from the last work session. I agree with councilor Ryan's point about having goals. I don't know what the optimal number is, and I think councilor, the council vice president's points about a retreat should assist in that regard as well. The question about testimony, I think, was discussed a little bit at the last work session. I'll reiterate just my preference to have testimony at both places, both to maximize public ability to weigh in, but also because testimony is different at different stages of a process. We have a idea or a problem statement, but it's not necessarily a proposal. Public input is much more open ended at that point. It tends to attract people with longer histories in a conversation or expertise. It's different when there is a proposal that is ready to be amended slightly, or perhaps simply a vote up or down, where the public testimony is likely to be narrower and more focused. I'll ask not to be mischaracterized. I never said we need everyone on every committee. I specifically asked about finance and governance, which I think are unique as nonpolicy areas and slightly different from the other six committees and whatever configuration those end up being. I agree with councilor Zimmermann that the committee of the whole does have a disadvantage around having to wait. And I think the question that we're talking about here is, is do we solve that problem by excluding seven members? I know that's not the suggestion, but that is ultimately the conversation we're asking here. And similarly, I don't think that anyone's abdicating their responsibilities. I don't think by virtue of not having a district representation on these committees, I think the issue is that there is a system that we've created which doesn't allow for people to have their representatives discuss an issue that's in their district and its boundaries. I agree that that that is a conversation with everything that councilor Novick said. I won't rehash it about the sci hub, and the last thing I'll point out, there are five of us that are co-chairs of a committee right now. All five of them have said it's a good idea, and I think that's a pretty notable thing. We've seen councilor Green councilor Novick twice over councilor Morillo, councilor Ryan and myself. I think that's notable. We're very different people stylistically, politically, and that's that's a thing that I wanted to just observe. And again, this quorum thing, if there is to be an executive team, which I'm not wedded to either way on that personally, if there is to be an executive team, I would be perfectly comfortable having my co-chair go to that, because what we're hearing, and I don't know if there's anything else which it would do besides make sure that there's information flow and potentially work out a challenging, does this go to this committee or that committee? I feel very confident that if I'm working with somebody not just councilor Novick, but any hypothetical co-chair, that that person understands what this committee does over time and can advocate for its role and spread what we're doing. I don't think this is, you know, taking unless the goal is to have an executive team which replaces some of the functions of the council presidency, which I don't think that's the goal from anyone here. But if that, that would be different. But if it's just information flow and kind of figuring out, you know, we're talking about traffic safety, is it better for that to go to transportation infrastructure or public safety? I'm perfectly content if councilor Novick is in that room and I'm not for it. And I think that we're building, we're building around the thing that has six people in it and not the thing that has 630,000 people in it, which is this room for a full council meeting. And I think those are that's a backwards way to have this conversation. Thanks.
81 Thank you councilor. Councilor Novick, I see you just got in the queue after councilor Novick's remarks. I want to move us a little bit in our conversation. Councilor Novick, go right ahead.
82 I just wanted to say to councilor Dunphy that I don't think the catholic church was ever more creative or vibrant than during the period, the two popes period of 1378 to 1417.
83 I appreciate the brilliance of everybody I serve with. Thank you all. So, colleagues, I think we've put a lot of issues on the table and not narrowed yet, which is a good thing. There's a lot of different perspectives here. I'll note that I think three of our colleagues have shared proposals to start from. I have worked through some thoughts on this, just from having tried to move us over the last few months and seeing what works and what doesn't, and had put some things on paper, decided not to share them because I wanted to see where the conversation was going, but feel like it's not fair to keep that all in my head. So you will be getting something in your inboxes from my staff in the next little bit, just so that you have a clear sense of where my head was before we entered this conversation, with the caveat that that was what I wrote down before I got to hear from all of you. But I want to make sure, for transparency's sake, to share it before we move into talking about. And councilor Dunphy filed his proposal first to start this conversation. So I want to give him the benefit of sharing first. But before we move into talking about any specific proposal, I had asked a few of our colleagues to sit down with the administration, and I asked you last week to share any thoughts you had for our council discussion. But I just want to turn back to those colleagues to see if you have any thoughts that you want to share about what we heard as it relates to this part of our work as well, and then offer mr. Jordan a chance to weigh in on anything from the administration that he's heard just about what is going well and what isn't, and what we might want to keep in mind as we move forward. That hasn't surfaced yet today. Councilor Kanal you were part of that and I see you nodding. Do you want to start off that conversation?
84 I do, and if you'll indulge 15 seconds, I will say the country of andorra has co-princes that are the ruling. There are two of them party. And it's a very small country and we're a small group of people. So I'll just invite you to, to take a look at that. It is a co-principality. Yeah. So anyway, I think the, the key takeaways that I had and I there may be other things that are, were more relevant to the other folks. Listening was twofold. The predictability was a big part of it having not just when the meetings are scheduled, but also how long they're going to be, which definitely informed. For example, my soft stop proposal idea as well, and the length of the meetings was was its own concern that was brought up as well for staff and for those listening. This this was primarily staff outside of council operations, which is its own team as well as our council staff. This was more the city operations side, the clerk's side, bureau of sorry, technology services. And I believe opensignal was also represented there. Our streamers. So the those two were the key things, the length of a meeting being what we said it was going to be and the predictability both in terms of the scheduling. But if we're going to add a meeting, it'd be better to just have it on the calendar instead of adding it a week in advance. And I think that all of this allows for that. There is a there was a conversation around just the aggregate hours have gone up because unlike for us, where we're on 3 or 4 committees each, for the most part staff has to be at all eight committees. And so there was that element too. And I think regardless of what version we come up with of this, it's likely to have fewer committees, I think. So I agree with councilor Ryan's point from last time that it it should be a parallel offsetting of hours based on that, and I think the staff feedback aligned with that. Thank you.
85 Thank you councilor, councilor Green or councilor Novick, do you have anything you'd like to add? Councilor Green?
86 Yes. Thank you, madam president. Echo, what councilor Kanal said about I think a salient takeaway was that predictability is pretty essential when it comes to managing the staff time, resources to staff, all of our at time at the dais. I also heard that with enough structure, enough planning, they can accommodate night meetings. And so I think that's why I'm, you know, at a minimum, comfortable with the, you know, the once per month, but really ideally two. But it also means that we cannot add more hours. In my view, we cannot add more hours in the aggregate to our time at the dais. So we're going to be pretty choosy on how we use it. I think it's easier. I think what I heard is that we can stay on budget, and it's easier for staff if we get into the regularity that I think councilor Zimmermann was speaking to. It's like every week, work session or committee of the whole, whatever we call it or however we choose to adopt that, that's topical. That leads to the council meeting. And then there's the possibility for overflow and that, you know, we get down to, I don't know, maybe service area lined, you know, five committees. And then that helps also on that side because, you know, when you what I also heard was that if you're holding a committee and you're asking deputy city administrators to come forth and give you a briefing, it's very disruptive to get that last minutes and to have it be like sort of duplicative of other spaces where the same thing is being talked about. And so those are the things I took away from that. I will flag that. They did tell us that the may 21st budget session was $30,000 in cost. And so that's something I want to make sure we avoid in the future. And I think, again, having the weekly council meetings where we can put the balance on how late we go will help us avoid that, that, that extremely large cost. So that's I think that's about all I had to add to that.
87 Thank you. Councilor. Mr. Jordan, is there anything.
88 Else we should know just in terms of what's going well and what is not going well, from the administrative perspective, from the perspective of the service areas that you're overseeing that we should know about before we move into a conversation about committee makeup.
89 Thank you. Council president. Let me say, first of all, this is a great conversation. I think you guys are covering the landscape really well. Of all the choices that are before you, let me also say that I appreciate the response from the smaller group that talked with staff. It's really important, particularly the ones who have to be here all the time for your meetings, who are on those assignments, and they run the gamut of people who are hiding in different corners of this building. And the last point on the logistics from councilor Green is that $30,000 was not a linear per hour thing. The first four hours were about a thousand bucks an hour. Beyond that, it went to more like 2 to 3000 bucks an hour. When we got out to our 12 to 15, it got even more. And so that is a perspective I know you'll keep in mind. Just a few observations from both the administrative side and maybe some about your your comments today. I don't think there'd be any question that if you asked all the staff, having fewer meetings to go to would be good. So just keep that in mind. I also want to make sure you understand that a big part of our job, particularly leadership in this organization, is to help you make good decisions. And so what you need to do that, that's part of our gig. Okay. That's what we should be doing for you. Having said that, certainly I will echo predictability, predictability for the public, predictability for staff, and predictability for you as you schedule your time to do all you wish to do. I would also echo what councilor Zimmerman said, and that is that I think the charter change, one of the big drivers was that elected officials need to spend more time in community, need to be more connected with your constituents. So while you can do that in a certain formal way when you're taking testimony, I don't think that's probably what they had in mind for your connection with community. So there's a balance to be drawn there. The more time you spend at this dais, the less time you spend in community. I think regular blocks of time would certainly help us as a staff be able to support you better, because we can start to plan out not just our next week, but we can start to plan out multiple weeks in advance when we know certain committees will be meeting at certain blocks, so that that's always helpful. I do think doing business every week for the city of this size, with this level of complexity, I think you got to start to think about moving toward a more weekly rhythm for doing the city's business. So I think I think that's a good trend for you to look at. I also think you have maybe more flexibility than you maybe think you have in the work session format. I know robert came up and talked to you about committee of the whole flexibility. I think you can use work sessions the way you want to. If you want to set up a time where you want to take public testimony at a work session, advertise the heck out of it. You all have your networks that you can get out to the public to come give testimony. And so I think you have a lot of flexibility in that format to use it. Strategic goals. I couldn't agree more with councilor Ryan's statement. I know many of you have echoed it in small ways. I just think life for all of us gets a lot better if this council and the mayor are together about what they think the really challenging issues that we should be spending our time working on. And I also agree with high level community metrics that we all can have a conversation about how the heck are we doing from time to time and look backwards and say, you know, we put a gazillion dollars into this. We didn't move the dial at all. Why didn't that happen? And then have a real conversation about the why question. And so I think, I think that will pay dividends for all of your committees. It will pay dividends for doing business and particularly for budgeting, if you can do that at some point. I would say that there is a strong argument for both committees aligned to service areas. I think there is also a strong argument for big policy questions. And how do you grapple with those? And those don't always overlap neatly. I often tell people that one of the biggest challenges we face as a city is that most of the big problems we face are multidisciplinary. They involve multiple bureaus at least, and sometimes multiple service areas to actually formulate a holistic solution. So there are arguments both ways there. I guess I would only argue for fewer. I think the last thing I'll say, and that is this notion of a leadership team, that element of if you want that to be part of your structure, I think there is a linkage between that and how many committees you have and how you govern them. So, or how you lead them maybe. So I think there's a connection there that maybe self-evident, but I wanted to make sure I said something about it. I'll stop there, madam president. I didn't want to take up too much of your time. Thank you. Thank you for asking, though.
90 Appreciate it.
91 Thank you for being here. I think it's helpful for us to hear what feedback you've gotten and your thoughts on the conversations you're hearing. I see councilor Koyama Lane in the queue. Let's hear from the vice president. And then after that, I am going to have us take a short break before we come back and talk a little bit more in specifics about what we might want to see out of our committees. And then we'll wrap up by 4:00 in order to stay on time, knowing that we have more conversation yet to be had. Councilor Koyama Lane.
92 The only thing I had was wondering if mr. Jordan can talk a little bit about his thoughts around co-chairs versus chair and vice chair, I, I it does mean something to me that many of the people on this dais who hold a gavel and they share it with someone in the co-chair model that it seems to be working. It also matters to me. I want to hear from the members on those committees how it's working for them. And I also want to hear from the executive side if there are some pros and cons I have just heard anecdotally from some other folks on the executive side, this idea that it can be hard to feel like meetings switch back and forth, that there's a bit of whiplash, but that's only from a handful of people, and I would love to hear from mr. Jordan's perspective if he has thoughts around that.
93 Mr. Jordan, please go right ahead if you'd like.
94 Thank you, council president. Thank you, council vice president, for the question. You know, I think early on we heard some of that when, you know, you were just getting used to the idea of co-chairs. And I think some of you did have very different ideas about what your committee might be going to be doing. I think that has subsided as you have gotten more understanding of each other. And I would say you're kind of cobid setting agendas. I think it's a lot. I think it's working its way through. I think it can work either way. I think it's always, I don't know, it's always more convenient, if you will, for those of us who are trying to interact, if there's one person to go to, right? No matter what the organization is, we always feel a little better when we know that's the person we go talk to when we have a question, but I think it has gotten a lot better over the seven months. The co-chair model has improved, and I think you guys are, for the most part, on the same page as co-chairs.
95 Thank you, mr. Jordan. Councilor Koyama Lane did you have any follow up to that?
96 I do, and if there's not time for this, that's okay too. Thank you so much, mr. Jordan. I just can't see. But if there are any dcas that feel like a burning comment that they'd like to chime in, I'd be interested in hearing their perspective. Otherwise. Happy to move on to the next thing. Before we move on. We have both. We have two of our dcas in the room. We have three in the room. Look at that. Would any of the three of you like to add any comments to what mr. Jordan has said? Councilor I see all dca is shaking their heads. No. And I apologize, mr. Causey. You were directly behind mr. Taylor. I didn't see you at first. There we go.
97 Thank you everyone.
98 Councilor Smith, before we take a break, did you have something to add?
99 Yes. I would just like to ask administrator jordan, who should we talk to about finding out a complete list of which bureaus go through which? Committees?
100 Councilor I can work with the administration to get that to everybody.
101 Sure. I do. You wish me to say anything?
102 If you have something that you want.
103 I guess my impression right now. Councilor, thanks for the question, is that council's current structure by policy area means that. Means that bureaus don't have a single point of committee to go to. It depends on the issue that's come up. Certainly some of our bureaus are fairly narrow, so they end up going to one committee generally, but we've got quite a few big bureaus that end up cutting across multiple policy areas with their issues. And certainly everybody tends to cut across with finance. And so we see a lot of crossover with them. But we can certainly I'm happy to work with council president regarding maybe looking at a primary for each bureau. Okay.
104 Thank you councilor. Colleagues, why don't we take a 15 minute break, give folks a little bit of time to stretch their legs, and if you haven't had a chance to look over the proposals from your colleagues that were sent earlier today and want to, this would be a great time. If you, like me, had a proposal hanging out there that you would like to share that you haven't had a chance to. This gives you a little bit of time to do so. We'll meet back here at 310 and then have 55 zero minutes to talk through some specifics. I don't expect that we'll land on consensus around a proposal for committees today, but I am hoping that we can get to a place where it's kind of clear what direction different folks are starting to move in. So we will enter into that part of the conversation starting at 310. Thank you all.
105 Thanks, keelan.
106 Welcome back. I am calling back to order our work session. We're missing one more person, but we will get him here. So colleagues, we talked about the work that we want committees to do. We talked about some of the ways we might think about our committee structure. I really appreciate councilor Ryan asking us to think about what our goals are and how we are using our systems to meet those goals, not setting using our systems to determine our goals. I'm paraphrasing you there, councilor. I really appreciate councilor Clark asking us to think about how we might back into a committee structure by starting with thinking about what we're here to do. I think those are related points. I don't expect us to come to any conclusions today, but I'd like us to talk a little bit about what a committee structure might look like, because folks have been clear over the last couple of months that a lot of people don't like what we have now. And while I think that committees ought to be revoted on every year at the start of the year when we elect or reelect a leadership team, that doesn't mean that they have to stay for that whole year. I think they could I think we could vote at the start of a new year to continue a committee structure that we already had. I don't think we need to change just for the sake of change. But when a lot of people have expressed frustration with what we have, it feels important to me that we consider alternatives. I want to note that when we first made our current committee structure, we had a conversation about what committees might look like, and there was a lot of conversation about fewer committees, fewer committees. And when it came time to actually cut down on committees, everybody said, but not that one and not that one. And this topic needs a committee, and this topic needs to be called out somewhere. So we risk that again today. And we've already heard a little bit of that through our conversation so far. We also started out the last time around with a lot of different needs to meet. Do we have more folks in leadership positions or fewer? Is a gavel the only way to be in a leadership position? Or, as some of our colleagues have shown, does not having a gavel give you the space to bring issues forward and lead on issues instead, do we organize committees around service areas, which creates more certainty for our leadership on the administrative side? Certainly some of our d. S have suggested that that works well or that they wish they had that. Do we create it around big conversations that we want to have, which was how I approached structuring things last time around, or by saying, what are we here to do? And making sure that those issues center our our committees. We also last time around were trying to balance everybody being new, everybody having a lot of things they were interested in or wanted to lead. On balance, the politics, frankly, of each committee and balance the hopes that everybody had as new councilors with making sure that as much as possible, we had all districts represented on each committee and as something needed to give, because you can't meet every criteria on every committee, every time. That last piece is what gave. And I've heard from 1 or 2 of our colleagues that that's frustrating to them and that as we move forward, perhaps other criteria should give instead. So I just throw that all out there to say there's a lot to consider. We won't be able to capture all of what everybody hopes to see, but I hope that today, over the next 45 minutes, we can have a discussion about priorities. It could be that you respond to one of the proposals that's out there. It could be that you offer up something new. It could be that you don't create a full proposal, but you just say, here's one thing that I think should be a priority in whatever we come up with. And I want to make sure that we have time to hear from everybody. But councilor Dunphy, I'd like to give you the honor of going first since you brought us the first proposal to start. Everyone's thinking.
107 Thank you, madam president. So, colleagues, I am bringing forward a proposal in the spirit of collaboration, one that we've all shown as we navigate this new form of government together. I like my proposal, but as I said earlier, I have no pride of authorship. This proposal was meant to be a starting point, a framework to help us function more effectively and equitably as a council. At its core is what I believe is a shared value among all of us. The importance of district representation and equity in the structures of our city. I started outlining my proposal by thinking about what is the core problem that we're trying to solve, and what does our work include and what does it not include? The city issues permits, and makes land use decisions. It builds houses, it facilitates new businesses and ensures life and safety. The city is responsible for public safety, including police, fire, emergency dispatch and Portland street response. The city digs in the dirt and it builds big things that serves all of us, but is stuff that the private sector would never build, and we work on things that affect the quality of life in our city, including economic development, climate change, music and art and culture, and the experience of Portland. And then there are those things that are largely inward looking, like citizen committee appointments, our own governance and the budget. And when I started this effort a few months ago, the city essentially had seven service areas, but we have since reduced to essentially five service areas that now align with my proposal. But that was not my intention. Originally. My proposal reduces the number of policy committees from 8 to 4. I've struggled a bit with giving each of them a proper title that's accurate and descriptive without being multiple sentences long. I'm not set on where I landed on any of them, but they are housing and homelessness, public works, public safety, and city life and economy. And then it adds this committee of the whole to handle shared operational responsibilities. Each policy committee would include members from all four districts, and every district would have the opportunity to lead as a committee chair. It's designed to be more manageable for council for staff, more transparent for the public, and more aligned to the realities of our current workload. That said, this structure isn't meant to be set in stone. I've left room for collaboration, particularly around the roles of vice chairs, areas like public testimony, a leadership group of committee chairs, and the vice president and council president, and refining the scope and names of the committees. My main goal is a framework grounded in equity and representation, and I welcome your ideas to make it stronger. The committee of the whole, in particular, gives us all a shared responsibility in guiding the systems that support our work, like the budget, governance and internal operations. And it reinforces our collective accountability. Many items that are presented in the committee of the whole could pass straight on to the consent agenda. If there's clear show of support. This is a step towards a council structure that's more accessible to the public, more balanced and more reflective of the communities we serve. So I'm looking forward to building this together. My I handed out a physical copy of my resolution last week, but there's additionally a electronic copy of it available on the clerk's website. I'm open to having any more conversations. If anyone would like to or answer any specific questions, but I believe that this structure gives space for our work to be done in a way that is accountable, consistent, and strategic.
108 Thank you, councilor, both for starting off a lot of our thinking about this. When you first brought the proposal forward, and also kicking off the discussion right now, councilor Avalos, would you like to either ask questions of councilor Dunphy or share thoughts about the proposal that you've put forward?
109 Hey there. I feel like I already shared my proposal, and so I'll just kind of let that lay. I think I just wanted to elaborate a little bit further on the committee of the whole, after I've listened to everyone discuss it. First, I'll say that work sessions and committees are not the same by law. Work sessions are informal. They're one off. They can't take formal actions. Committees, especially committee of the whole, has powers in defining that are defining code. And so it's not a duplication. I see this as a correction. I also think that the committee of the whole gives the full council real power. It's structured in a way that it's a recurring space where every councilor Can participate with decision making authority. Right now, a handful of us are locked out of shaping policy on governance and finance. Those are like the biggest things that we do, in my opinion, and I don't believe that. That's right. And I don't think that's democratic. I think that work sessions today are reactive and scattered. It'd be different if I was seeing a coordinated strategy for work sessions. But we're not they're not strategic. They often come too late. And so I think that the committee of the whole creates a standing venue to talk about citywide direction and align across the committees as well, before we're in some kind of crisis mode, I also hear people talk about trust. This is about strategy, not trust when it comes to how we govern, how we budget. No councilor Should be sidelined. And you know this whole well, I trust my colleagues and I trust the committee. That's not a substitute for shared leadership. I am elected to do that work, and I want to make sure that I have the space to bring in the voice of the people that I represent on those critical citywide governance and financial discussions. Other cities. I bring it up because it's a tool that works. Of course, no city is like us. We designed this form of government specifically to not be like any other city. We are trailblazing on trying to create a new kind of governance. So this is a way to continue to enhance that. And this really goes hand in hand with the type of governing that the charter envisioned. And in general, governance and finance are citywide concerns. They don't belong in silos. So I just want to make sure that everyone's at the table for the issues that are shaping the future of our city, not just people who were lucky enough to be assigned to that committee. And I think that ultimately, if we're serious about equity and accountability, then we need this. We need the structure that this sets to determine who has influence and when on these big picture issues. And I think this kind of structure creates transparency and consistency and collaboration. So I just wanted to add my thoughts since I've been hearing how people have been talking about it, I think it's pretty straightforward and I think we desperately need it. Thanks.
110 Thank you. Councilor colleagues, does anybody else want to jump in on thoughts on committees? Councilor canal.
111 Thank you, madam president, and thank you for your framing comments. I agree with you about the annual versus other revision timelines, and I think this year being the first year, it makes sense to reexamine mid-year. I also want to clarify that I appreciated your point about the criteria you were looking at in the context of district representation back in January. I wanted to start by observing the consensus items between the three items, the three proposals we've looked at, and the council president's new suggestion, which was handed out. And these are increasing levels of commonality. At the top of the list, I noted five. There's a there seems to be consensus around retaining some type of community and public safety committee in all four proposals that are very similar in how they're defined. All of them combine what is now in labor and workforce development, largely with arts and economy, although in at least one there's some further combination to that committee as well. All four have a change to climate resilience and land use. They're different changes. Some move parks away, some move resilience away, some eliminate it altogether. But I think that recognizes that as it is currently written, there's a desire to change it in all four proposals. All four end the practice of separate limited membership, finance and governance committees. Three make it a committee of the whole, and the fourth combines it into a single limited membership committee covering both topics. Finally, all four retain transportation and utilities in a single committee. Two also combine it with parks. One, it doesn't say explicitly combines it with parks and then some. I think, at least in my reading. And the fourth one moves parks out from where it is now, which is mostly in climate but into other committees. So those are five points of consensus that I'm noting here, and I think that's a really good place to kind of start, I will say for myself in reading the public safety committee, I will probably propose a more descriptive and less enumerative way of describing the committee based on the conversations that councilor, Novick and I had following. Taking the input of all the committee members back in our first meeting, we kind of discussed what is the how would you describe it if bureaus were not in existence and you were building it? How would you describe the conversation? And I think that's built around, you know, describing it in the sense of law enforcement, in the sense of prevention, intervention and response to safety concerns. Words like that that help understand why would something be here beyond simply this bureau goes here. And so I'm supportive of that broadly and would love to revisit that. But that's the commonality I noted in all four. And I think if that is in fact a consensus, it might help save us some time.
112 Thank you, councilor, for laying those pieces out. Councilor Novick.
113 Not going to go through my entire proposal, but two aspects of it I propose having a housing and homelessness committee, a public works committee, which would be service area. It would include parks and recreation. I recognize that might make the workload of that committee a little extreme. So welcome, chair clarks and other people's reaction to that. A public safety committee that is somewhat similar to what we have now, following what other people have said, combined economic development, workforce, labor, music and arts. Those are that's two committees that have met a total of 14 times, for a total of 24 hours. And then we would continue to have a committee that deals with land use issues, climate initiatives, including managing our relationship with PCEF, which is a 200 million a year item, I will note addressing issues related to the ci hub. I attached Eric engstrom's email listing proposed topics just in land use in this committee for the next several months. I really think it would be a mistake to combine land use, climate, and resilience with housing. I mean, that means you'll be taking to committees that have met for 42 hours in a total of 23 times and combining them together. And I think the number of meetings that they've had reflects the workload that they have. And I think if you combine them together, then you'd wind up either rubber stamping land use decisions or not providing sufficient oversight of the mayor's plan to end unsheltered homelessness or forgetting about climate altogether. And I think that it is useful to have a committee that's largely concerned about the future in terms of shaping the city of the future, in terms of land use, in terms of climate. And then, like others have suggested, the committee of the whole will deal with deal with finance, governance, budget, hr, some things that we deal with in executive session now anyway, and of us rushed through the rest and say that, as I've discussed, I like the idea of having co-chairs. I think that that model works. I know that some folks like councilor Zimmerman don't agree with it, but I've been pleased with how many people have said that they think the model works, and I appreciate that. Administrator jordan has said that he thinks that we sort of worked the kinks out of that. Thank you.
114 Thank you, councilor, councilor Clark.
115 Thank you, madam chair. I really appreciate the work that everybody's done. And in particular, councilor Trying to pull it all together, find the commonalities. That was really, really valuable to hear. I think that's the easiest way to go about coming to a conclusion here. I also am just reading your proposal, council president and appreciating that as well. And I just have some specific comments about infrastructure. I would just like to put a plug in, whether we call it infrastructure or public works. I really want to see parks at least part of parks, the hard part of parks, the hard surfaces, the natural areas in the public works or infrastructure committee. Also, you can take the recreation part away, but somewhere else. But also, you know, we have we have budget amendments or budget notes that deal with this, that deal with public private partnerships and with volunteerism. And we directed that to public works, actually. So I would like to see parks come under there. There are other questions I have. If we pursue your proposal, I have questions about your administrative changes that come to council. I'm not sure what you mean by that, but it's also the committee that will deal probably mostly with asset management. And even though there's a large a lot of assets going into some other committee that deals with arts and economy, the p5 and all of and the athletic facilities, I just think that public works should have at least the parks piece. The rest of that, it just seems like we're dealing with we're just splitting hairs, kind of. I'm not sure how we proceed, but I really appreciate what councilor Canal has done to try to find the overlaps and also the metrics that council councilor Novick has come up with. I think that was that's also useful as well, even though I don't agree with the co-chairs, but I'll just limit my comment comments to that for now. Thanks.
116 Thank you councilor. Councilor Ryan. Yes.
117 Thank you, madam president. A couple questions. First of all, yes. Thank you. I like all the way we're bringing synthesis to this. I have a question for you, councilor Dunphy. Would you say the committee of a whole is similar to the governance and finance description that you see in the largely.
118 Yes, absolutely. The only real difference for me is just the. Candidly, I turned it into a committee of the whole, because I don't believe that this body will defer on these issues, and that I was thinking about it in the terms of both making sure we have a good product at council and that we aren't rehashing every issue at the full council.
119 Based on your lived experience from the last six months. Yeah, okay. And then there's been a conversation about where you put parks, and this has been a conversation for a while. And I think what you said earlier, city administrator michael jordan, that all of your city leaders look at things in a cross-discipline manner. But with parks, we've made some decisions over time that I think I'm hearing in repetition. I think the nature that obviously the big it's the biggest land holders. So there's a reason for it to be under the climate committee and land use. And when it comes to that. But of course, on the rec side, it's totally connected to the economy and arts and economy. It's also the biggest arts presenter in the city is parks. And then we have the rangers and we have safety issues. So it's an example of parks because it's our biggest, most external committee out there where people play. It's messy in a good way. And so it does enter into all these different committees at any given time. So even though some of the name sounds similar to the practice areas, I think we always have to remember that there'll be that cross-discipline. So I'm not that attached to that as much. I think we're getting there. So I think my process question then to you, madam president, when I listen to the different proposals from colleagues up here, it seems like we're forming one in particular. But I wonder if the people who have have brought them forward, the councilors could huddle up and see where you could come together in a grand bargain of where they match. Like I liked what I saw from councilor Novick today. It looked like taking some of the better parts of others. And then your synthesis is wonderful, council president. So I'd hope that we're building upon these. What I want to do is, second any of these right now and have amendments on any of them until we have that synthesizing and I don't know if we should do it in this, I don't want to do it in this meeting with all of you. I don't think anyone does.
120 My hope.
121 Councilor Ryan, is that coming out of the discussion today, there's some clear directions where a lot of people are moving. I think councilor Kanal synthesis of some commonalities and differences was really helpful. And that. My hope and we may not get there, is that I could try to put together what we're hearing from a lot of different people today into a new proposal that doesn't look like my current one or anybody else's current one, but looks like where the conversation seems to land today. That could come to a special council meeting next week for us to discuss. We may not get there. That may not be possible. We'll see how the next 27 minutes goes. Yeah. Councilor Green.
122 Thanks, madam president, thanks for bringing forward your proposal. Along with the others, I would like to add my voice to. First of all, I support in all the proposals. I see an effort to bring the current arts and economy committee, together with labor and workforce and together with the recreation side of parks. What I like in the council president's proposal is there's an explicit recognition that this committee should probably, whatever we call it, should probably be an opportunity for the city operations service area to engage directly, because there, you know, there are big questions there related to space activation, related to kind of coordinating the economic life of our city. And I think that's good. I agree with the comments that councilor Novick made about. I'm actually torn, but I think I'm compelled by this idea that you can't put housing in the in with the climate committee just because of the sheer volume of work. I I'm torn because I think how we change our approach to housing production, this city will either chart a path towards a sustainable future or it will not. And so there is a certain amount of overlap there. I think earlier in the day we had talked about spinning up the cross committee joint work. And so if we're thinking about zoning and code changes that are driven by a sustainability metric, that's an opportunity to do that. But I think having the climate resilience and land use committee stand is highly appropriate, especially given the volume of work that we do. I, I continue to be a little bit perplexed about the committee. The whole question. I think for me, when I read robert's rules, my understanding of the whole point of it is it's an informal body where you can relax the rules of procedure to have free form debate. And if that's true, you're not taking any action, you're not voting on things. And so I don't I hear councilor Avalos appeal for some structure and inclusivity, which is why I think we should have something, whether it's a work session or a committee as a whole. But if we're not voting things out of that committee, I'm not sure why it's any different than just a special meeting of city council or work session. It's currently where I'm at. But I also would like to provide feedback on your your schedule. I think I agree with the broad schedule here. Council president, I think that's oh, one last question, councilor Novick. Can I think in your proposal, you said each council will be on at least two committees. Is that is that a correct reading?
123 That is, it's not something I'm wedded to.
124 Okay. Thanks.
125 Thank you. Councilor. Councilor zimmermann.
126 Thanks.
127 I'm sorry, councilor Novick, have you.
128 You haven't spoken yet this round? I apologize or have you?
129 Let's see.
130 I'm going to take myself down for now, I think. I think I forget what I was going to say.
131 Councilor zimmermann, go right ahead.
132 Thanks. I guess one of the main questions for me, with respect to any of these is whether or not we're going to, by ordinance, give some authority for decision making at the committee level, because one of my major, major concerns. I've cited it before, is that by combining what seems to be the midwest and east coast style with our west coast vibe of city councils, we've basically just doubled the length to do anything in a city council, and I'm not a fan of it. And I think we're beating around a very important bush here, which is come to committee, do a thing in committee, do it again at least a couple weeks later, do it again in council. A few weeks after that, testimony, testimony, testimony and nothing new is happening in those cases. So I'm trying to understand if that is working for us. I think for some things where committees are truly discussing and shaping a policy, it in theory can work. But in some stuff where it is, it is just drawing out a longer process. And so given that while there's some debate about which one of these proposals, I'm not a huge fan of changing in the month of August or later because we're going to have a vote for council president in January anyway. And I think the churn is not good for us right now. But but under underlying, all those are what do we want our committees to do. And I don't feel like we've got a good answer to that right now. And if we're going to continue to rehash everything in full council, just because it was only heard in a committee, I would like to know where where folks want to go with that. Are we willing to give up some some decision making or are we not? Should everything just happen in work sessions and then everything happen in council? Because this repetitiveness of it continuing over and over and just redrawing everything feels drawn out for the sake of process and not for the sake of results. But I am curious about some thoughts on that as these were developed.
133 Councilor is that a question specifically to the people who brought proposals forward, or just to councilors generally about what they hope to see?
134 Yeah, generally. Generally looking for folks ideas about that, how we feel about the work that comes from committees, of course, those of you that wrote proposals, but really to everybody.
135 Thank you. Council president. Can I just add on to that, just to that that there are you have a lot.
136 Of Novick are you okay with councilor Clark jumping in to ask? Okay.
137 So there are a lot of things that you list that seem to me could go direct to council that have to don't have to go through a committee. I mean things like land disposition, eminent domain, land swap, administrative changes, those kinds of things. Are there some things that can just go right to full council, that or something that a bureau brings to us that they have to have done? It's kind of a no brainer. I throw that out there.
138 That's a committee of the whole.
139 I. I'm going to put myself in the queue to share my vision on how that could work. But I believe councilor Novick hasn't spoken and he is in the queue, so we'll jump to him first.
140 Thank you, madam president. So two things. One about the leadership committee. I mean, I agree with what somebody just said about this is not a council where people who defer to other people very much. And to me, the idea of a leadership committee really is about having the committee chairs get together and know what each other are doing and like, figure out, you know, okay, you're covering that. We don't need to do this. Nobody seems to be covering this. One of us should do that. I think of that as more informational, and I'm actually not even sure. With all due respect, the council president even needs to be part of that, although I think it would be useful for the committee chairs to sort of share out their discussion at the next meeting so everybody hears the results of those discussions. I also think that it might be useful for each of us to sit down. I took like a kind of a stab at this with the climate committee by asking Eric engstrom what he has in mind for our committee, but for each of us to like, who are either on our committee or proposing a committee exists, sort of lay out what we think the next few months work might be so that the decisions we make can be informed by that. So if we're talking about combining committees, we'll get a sense of whether we'll still cover the important work those committees have to do over the next few months. I just think that, again, having that concrete list of, all right, here's what people are planning to do now, here's that will help us determine what will work in a new structure.
141 Thank you. Councilor, I want to respond to councilor Clark's add on to councilor Zimmermann's question. From my perspective as an individual councilor. I personally think that things should go through committees in general. I think that there is more space to have a more effective conversation with a smaller group. So that to the point that councilor Zimmerman made earlier when he waited 40 minutes to talk about something, because there were people in the queue who hadn't spoken yet, we are better able to have that that free flowing discussion. On the three items that you named eminent domain different because of the political nature of eminent domain. But the other two, I proposed recently that we start putting those on the consent agenda, and that worked very successfully last month. Personally, I would prefer to see more robust debate in committees and more of the things where we are really providing oversight to the administration's actions, but not developing new policy placed on consent so that we pull things off, consent to discuss when they are highly controversial, but otherwise assume that the conversation that has happened in committee is probably sufficient. That's a different strategy and theory than I think some of our colleagues have for how things should move and where we should have debate, and I recognize that. But personally, I think we can have that better debate in committee. And I think that everything, even those things where we are just weighing in on a technicality and most of the work is done by the administration, should have debate somewhere, either in committee or in council.
142 So can I just respond to that? I, I appreciate that makes a lot of sense. But I feel like at least in the public works or infrastructure committee, that there's a lot of those, a lot of those little pieces that come from transportation or water bureau, it just seems like the volume is pretty, could be, could be pretty high. And that's why I'm thinking if we can push it off somewhere else, we can get more of what we want. Done, done.
143 Hours are hours. And so I guess I would say those things can be pushed to council and debated at council, where it will likely take more hours. It can be debated in committee where that debate might happen more efficiently, or it cannot be debated at all. Where I think we are abdicating some of our responsibility. I know that when we've heard those things in finance, there have been times where we move very quickly through them because we can recognize at this point which of these land swaps might be controversial and which ones are not at all controversial. So I, I think that there is an ability for whether it's at committee or at council, for us to be judicious about how quickly we move.
144 So does that decision rest with you where those things go, then that rests with the council president, where those things get assigned. You make an initial judgment on that.
145 Right now. They do. Right now, anything coming from the administration is by by code. I believe the council president assigns what committee they go to.
Procedural episode · turns 146–154
Parliamentary activity detected in this stretch (see the markers above). An editor-reviewed analysis has not been published for this episode yet.
146 Okay.
147 Councilor. I don't believe anybody else on here hasn't spoken yet. So, councilor Zimmermann, go right ahead.
148 That was a legacy.
149 Okay, councilor Dunphy.
150 Thank you. I have three other things I'm hoping to respond to. First. Colleagues, I'm looking to get some consensus from everybody here about whether or not having every district represented in every committee is a core value that we should aspire for. There's the math always works out. You can make it work, but if we don't write it down explicitly, we won't end up there. And so, following along with councilor Canales observation of five common things, I would like to see that every district is represented in every county, in every committee. If that's not a value that this body cares about, great. We'll move on. But as if people could let me know, I'd be interested to know that. And I'm sort of taking notes on these things. Thanks to Eric engstrom. I'm a land use nerd now I got to go through the city's 2035 comp plan process ten years ago. I know more about the underlying zoning of parts of this town than I ever wanted to, and ever can hope to be free of. I think it's intrinsically aligned to our housing strategy. I, as the vice chair of the housing and homelessness committee, I don't know how I can do my job without also having land use being part of what I'm talking about. And I think that that really, desperately needs to be a part of the conversation. Similarly, I have always viewed climate as something responding to climate change, as something that we the way we do our business rather than a discrete thing we do. We don't have an office of climate change. We embed climate change policies into our transportation, into our environmental services, into our parks. So I think we need to call it out by name in some explicit way, but I don't think it needs to be a separate committee on its own. And then third. We've had this conversation around a committee of a whole versus expanding the work sessions versus a new additional council hearing. The two things that come to mind, specifically that I'm trying to solve for are the budget so that we don't have 20 hour long marathon amendments, that we have a good idea that everyone's had an opportunity to weigh in over a period of time. If we just do that through work sessions, that won't work. Well, I don't think. And then also, as we you know, governance is currently an important thing that I think everybody should have some input on. It will become, I think, less daily relevant as time goes on as we've answered some of these questions, but I, I think that while the committee of the whole is a little clunky, I think it is responsive to our both our needs and our work styles for right now. And again, as we've talked about, we can call the question again in 12 months if that doesn't work. So those are the three things that I am still thinking about.
151 Thank you. Councilor councilor Kanal.
152 Thank you, madam president. I think I understood the council president's comments earlier as understanding that the criteria had evolved in a way that that meant that we would see that being weighted higher, the district representation. So that plus the fact that this isn't a code change, I don't know that it needs to be written here down specifically. It is a high priority for me. And it's, as I said, the reason I had my opinion on this original committee structure back in January to the specific committees. I would love to retain a public and community safety committee. I want to plug keeping community in the name, though, to try and channel my co-chair spirit here. I wouldn't mind putting it as public and community safety because we're currently pronouncing our committee as caps, and this would change it to pax, which means peace in latin, I would I will be proposing a small change to the description via amendment. I propose I support retaining transportation and infrastructure. I agree with councilor Clark about a portion of parks going there. I do think infrastructure makes a good name. I support combining labor and workforce development with arts and economy. I like the idea of trying to. There's a lot of words there. If we start doing this comma, that comma and that kind of things. Having said that, I think culture, workers and economy are all ideas there that make sense to me. I'd also be fine with most of the recreation side being discussed there. Housing and homelessness I like as is, or with climate and land use conversation. I'm unsure about where I stand as it relates to that being a standalone committee, I do think resilience should be separated either way, and my preference would be that that goes into community and public safety. I think that's the future looking part of it. And given how much of pbms work is in there, I do think that there's a connection point. And then finally, I remain open to a committee of the whole or work session allowing testimony. But I'd like to end both the finance and governance committees as limited membership committees. My issue is only with that aspect of it. I think the two chairs have done a good job. I like the idea of councilors Koyama Lane and Zimmerman partnering on leading whatever form this new thing takes, whether it's running the committee of the whole or them planning agendas together for standing work sessions. I think philosophies can change on this, but I liked councilor Dunphy and councilor Ryan's conversation earlier about lived experience, and I thought it was illustrative because we haven't seen the deference to finance or governance that we have to the other committees, partially because those issues are fundamentally different and affect everyone more. I have been very comfortable saying, I'm going to look at this and tweak and adjust or propose a small change for things like housing and homelessness, which also affects all of us. I think no voter didn't think about housing and homelessness when deciding who to choose as a city councilor, but it has just fundamentally played out differently when it's been finance and governance. And I think that's the key reason for that support on my part. Thank you.
153 Thank you, councilor. Councilor Green.
154 I just threw up my hand to directly respond to councilor Dunphy's request to kind of get where we're at, see where we're at on the district representation piece. You know, I I'm pretty comfortable. I'm hearing from my colleagues that there's it's pretty important to make sure that there's at least one person from each district on each committee. I kind of went into it thinking that, like, just from the allocation of the people we have right now, I'm fine. You know, I think there was a comment about the sci hub. I mean, I'm very active on that question, and I'm not on that committee, but we do change these every year or so. We can always recalibrate. So yeah, I think right now I'm pro putting it down in our next committee structure that way. But I don't think you need to have the chairs be each committee represented by someone from a different district. I think that's a different question.
155 Thank you. Councilor. Councilor Koyama Lane.
156 Thank you, madam president. Thank you for the initial framing of the questions and comments. I think it's been helpful for this conversation to go back to councilor Novick's question for me, asking me to weigh in on ideal meeting times and our our attention span. I, I wanted to do a little bit of research to see if there was some set data. I think a lot depends on circumstances like if you can move around if there are snacks. But in general, I think going after like based on this meeting, I have found that it's at about two hours. We all kind of need a break at least. So that's my comment. There doesn't mean that meetings can't be longer than two hours, but I think at two hours you need a break. To speak to councilor Dunphy's question. I do prefer and believe it's best practice to have every district represented in each committee. I think that's something we should strive for. I think that's something that the council president and I did strive for, and we got five out of the eight. I think this next round, we really should try to get it for every single one. I, I think it's this balance of when is something best practice and when is something that you really want to solidify in code. I am open to hearing about. Either way. I do think, especially after hearing it from many councilors and from the public. I do think that we will people we will likely always have try to have that representation from every district on each committee, or else we're likely really going to hear about it. So I think it's best practice something we should strive for. And if the majority of folks want it in code, I'm I'm open to that. I coming back to having chairs, co-chairs versus chairs and vice chairs for me, I really just want to make sure that our city staff know who to go to. So if we end up going with co-chairs or chairs and vice chairs, I if it's co-chairs, I really would like to have a primary for dcas and bureau directors so they know where to go. And I love councilor Ryan's idea that we bring together some of these folks that have been thinking deeply about this and see where the overlap is, see if they can think through some ideas about these committees. I think a lot of these plans look pretty good. I would like to have try to stick to 4 or 5 committees, though, for quorum reasons, around being able to gather a leadership team. I think best practice would be that in that leadership team, we would have every district represented. Not sure if that should be set in code, though. I think that would be best practice. And I think that leadership team is important for supporting council leadership, for ensuring more collaboration, and also just for communication and information to make sure that that is getting out from council president and I council wide. And just also want to reiterate, I've heard it come up. I agree that we should continue to think about ways we can use the consent agenda more to help streamline some of our meetings, and I think that's it. Thank you. I think we're doing a great job talking through all this, everyone.
157 Thank you. Council vice president. Sorry, I'm just looking at the list here and who hasn't spoken as much. Councilor Novick. Go right ahead.
158 Yeah.
159 Two things. One is in my proposal.
160 I don't I'm not wedded to the idea of having district representation on every committee. I think it would be nice. I don't think it's a must have. As to councilor Dunphy's comment about the relationship of land use to housing, you're absolutely right. The two things need to be aligned. I don't know that that means they have to be in the same committee. I think that the chairs and vice chairs of those committees should meet regularly to make sure we're aligned, which I think we all sort of ideologically are. I also although in theory we would be integrating climate and everything we do, I don't think that happens automatically. I don't think that the infrastructure committee is automatically going to be spending a bunch of time thinking about how we reduce carbon emissions from transportation. I don't know that any committee is necessarily going to be thinking about how we reduce emissions from buildings, and certainly no committees can be thinking about how we reduce emissions from food. So I think that if climate is not a particularly significant part of the job of any committee, then it's going to be left to those of us individually who care about it to be squeaky wheels. And I just worry that that won't be as effective.
161 Thank you, councilor, councilor Zimmermann. Also responding to councilor Dunphy's question specifically. No, I don't support a code that says every committee must have a member from every district very clearly. I don't I don't I don't support most of these things being in code. I think I will vote for a council president who most aligns with my values every January and puts forth a plan for committees and committee chair and vice chairs that I think is the most responsible leadership team that can exist. So that it's not that I don't think those things are important, but I the more we put in code, the less we have for leadership to be able to step up and show or shine. And that's what I'm looking for. I don't think that. I was I'll just leave it there. I think it's a big difference between being against something versus not thinking it's appropriate for code. Right. And that's really where I'm taking a stand here is that line I think code should allow for leadership to thrive and different styles to meet, different moments to exist.
162 Thank you. Councilor, councilor Dunphy and canal one minute each. Let's see if we can do this.
163 Very quickly. My proposal is in a resolution. Council clerk informed us that an ordinance would not be appropriate because this is not council code. Council committee structure is a resolution agreed upon by the body. So we can put those bookends in place and not have it be code, which is my preference as well. That's all.
164 Councilor Kanal.
165 Thank you, madam president. I'm good with a mid break and a two plus hour meeting. I think that's a good practice as it relates to having a primary point of contact, I'd suggest two things. We have the ability to all meet together regularly, like both co-chairs and a dca or their representative. The other thing I'll note, which we've used successfully at our committee, is our council operations staff doing the liaising after we plan together what we're looking at and what we're hoping to have in terms of presentations. And every committee is a little different because we haven't had a ton of legislation come through us from the administration yet, but that might be helpful in some of the other committees as well. Finally, there's been discussion about the consent agenda. I just flag that in addition to that, the time certain agenda is really important, and I'd like to see that used more. I think that would create more predictability for the public as well. Thank you.
166 Thank you. Colleagues, we are at 4:00. I think we've heard a lot of good ideas, a lot of debate, a lot of places where folks are moving in the same direction, but a lot of places where there is not yet consensus. I know that councilor Canal put forward an ordinance from our last meeting, which, in order to hear this week, needs nine signatures. I'm not sure where we're at on that yet. I intend to schedule us six. Okay. I intend to schedule a special meeting for next week. There should be a time held on calendars already so that we can continue our discussion in a council meeting where we can maybe make some decisions about our conversation today and councilor Kanal if the ordinance on full council meetings doesn't make the agenda this week, we can schedule that for next week as well. Colleagues, I'm happy to talk more about the proposal I put forward. If folks have individual questions, I know that many of my colleagues who put forward proposals have expressed an interest in doing that as well. I think we can continue to have some conversations while being mindful of the needs of serial meeting laws and public meetings over the next week or so, and then come back together next week to see if we want to move forward with a change, or if there's not consensus around a change at this time. Thank you all for the time today, and I'll note for the public that all four proposals that were passed out before today's meeting are now online, linked to this work session. So they are all public. Anything new councilors move forward would not yet be linked there. Thank you all and I will close today's work session.