The record · Transcript
Council Session — 2025-07-07
Transcript from the session's official auto-captions (12,967 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
The Governance Committee met on Monday, July 7, 2025, with roll call reflecting the body's members present. The session opened with a review of a "Public Meetings Do's and Don'ts" document prepared by the City Attorney's Office addressing Oregon public meetings law, including discussion of quorum thresholds, on-site inspections and tours, serial communications, social media use on councilor versus personal accounts, and the distinction between council and committee quorums. Questions were raised about whether field trips or tours involving a quorum of a committee could be publicly noticed, and about potential legal challenges to state public meetings law enforcement, with reference to related activity by the League of Oregon Cities. Discussion touched on adding this material to a governance rulebook and pursuing state legislative changes in a future session. The second item covered a draft "Best Practices for Collaborative Policy Making" document, developed with input from City Operations staff, outlining a proposed process for legislative directives modeled on Minneapolis's approach, including steps for review, service area engagement, and drafting. Committee members discussed adding budget and implementation considerations, community engagement, and clarified how this document relates to existing processes for resolutions and ordinances. A closing update covered the Governance Reset RFP process, including committee composition, scoring timeline, and a targeted August contract completion, followed by discussion of scheduling a council retreat before larger structural decisions. The meeting adjourned after these updates.
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.
0 All right. Good afternoon. I call the meeting of the governance committee to order. It is Monday, July 7th, 2025. It is 2:33 p.m. Diego, will you please call the roll?
1 Clerk.
2 Here.
3 Dunphy, here.
4 Pirtle-guiney here.
5 Ryan, here.
6 Koyama Lane here. Craig, will you please read the statement of conduct?
7 Welcome to the meeting of the governance committee to testify before this committee in person or virtually. You must sign up in advance on the committee agenda at ed.gov. Agenda governance committee. Or by calling 311. Information on engaging with the committee can be found at this link. Registration for virtual testimony closes one hour prior to the meeting. In-person testifiers must sign up before the agenda item is heard. If public testimony will be taken on an item, individuals may testify for three minutes unless the chair states otherwise, your microphone will be muted when your time is over, the chair preserves order. Disruptive conduct such as shouting. Refusing to conclude your testimony when your time is up or interrupting others testimony or committee deliberations will not be allowed. If you cause a disruption, a warning will be given. Further disruption will result in ejection from the meeting. Anyone who fails to leave once ejected is subject to arrest for trespass. Additionally, the committee may take a short recess and reconvene virtually. Your testimony should address the matter being considered. When testifying. State your name for the record. If you are a lobbyist, identify the organization you represent. Virtual testifiers should unmute themselves when the clerk calls your name. Thank you.
8 Thank you. Today we will review a document on Oregon public meetings law and have a discussion on what a quorum of council or a council committee can and cannot do. And we will also review a guide on best practices for collaborative policy making across our legislative and administrative branches. Diego, will you please read the first item?
9 Item one public meetings, do's and don'ts.
10 Thank you. So there is an attachment that you will see here. And it's a do's and don'ts list that I asked our team in the city attorney's office to prepare and was drafted by one of our one of our attorneys, linly reese. So given the complexity of our Oregon state level public meeting laws passed recently by the state legislature with house bill 2005, and also by being a new governing body ourselves, I requested a simplified list of public meeting do's and don'ts to help us as we navigate the way we approach internal collaboration and communication. Linly has offered to receive feedback and continue to make edits or address additional situations in the document, if that is helpful for us. And linly is also here with us. Thank you so much today to answer any questions and provide more background as we discuss. And I know this is something that has come up, I know this is something that vice chair Ryan has brought up, and so I'm hoping we can have a conversation and also take a look at this and see what questions and see what comes up. So yeah, go ahead and put your hand in the queue if you'd like to chat. Or last time it was just us three ladies and we didn't even use hands. We were fine. We didn't miss you guys though. All right, councilor Clark.
11 Thank you, madam chair. I do have a couple comments and questions. I think this chart is really helpful. I can't see linly. Is she here? Oh, okay. You're hiding. I can't see you, but it's really, really helpful. And I just want to raise two questions. Hi, linly. So when you say thank you and on site inspection. So for example, I just want to, you know, run an example by you is we're going to take the transportation and infrastructure committee on some tours. Right. We're going to go tour the ibr. Maybe the rose quarter, not sure, but so I consider that's an on site inspection to go on a tour of a potential project.
12 Yes it is. I think we have advised that based on the trainings that are out there and councilor Koyama Lane, if you don't mind me putting a plug in before I answer the question, all of you are required to at least once every term, take a training that is either provided by the ogc or that is approved by the ogc. And so I would love to see all of you do that sooner rather than later if possible. There are a couple online that we can guide you to if you're interested in doing that. Barry elsner, who's a law firm who provides work for a lot of municipalities, and the league of cities, both have trainings on youtube, so we can do that. In response to your question, I think the tricky part about on site inspections is you're allowed to do those with a quorum, so long as there's no deliberations and you're not receiving information that is leading to your decision making. I think that makes it really tricky. So, for example, when you all came on board, we had identified some possible tours that would be great for all of you to do, but if there was a quorum, there was going to be somebody needing to be there to ask you not to talk about what you were seeing and learning. And so I think while the onsite inspection exists, if you are deliberating or talking about those issues while you're on the tour, it can make it into a public meeting that should have been noticed. So I think we have to be really careful. And if you had a particular set of circumstances, we'd want to talk through how to do that.
13 So, for example, let's just say that committee members are on a tour of ivr. And if we just ask questions of the tour guides, that's probably okay. Just to get more information about this or that or the other thing.
14 If it is, if it is a quorum of the council, I think that raises some risk for you to do that.
15 To ask the tour guide a question.
16 I do. Oh, that's that is my opinion again, I am we do not these are not our rules. These are the state rules. And so if we wanted to get some input from ogc we could.
17 Okay. Well we'll just let that rest for a second. I have a I have another question. One of the things that some of us have talked about, where we have committees that have shared issues or issues that overlap, we'd like to have a meeting with two committees at the same time. And I understand that makes a quorum of the council. Can you address that for us?
18 So what the public meetings law does is it makes it so that you have to notice things and you have to provide, you know, a geographic location. So if you had it here, I suppose we could notice it as both a committee meeting. And I haven't thought how we would do this.
19 For a work session.
20 Yeah. I mean, I think that might make more sense to do it as a full council work session led by two committees, because I think you're still going to have to notice it as a council meeting in some way. If you have a quorum of the council, they're talking about council business.
21 Thank you. Linly.
22 Vice chair. Ryan.
23 Thank you. Chair, I'm glad you're up there. Linly. I think I want to crosswalk what you were what we were talking about with the quorum issues. So. So the reason I brought up quorum a while ago. And is this. I know right now, it's like there's 12 of us, so you can meet up to six people with the sunset laws, but that doesn't make sense to me because we have committees. And so at any given time, if there's six of us, there's a likelihood that three of us could be the majority in a committee. So I'm against the fact that people currently can meet as a team of six without letting the public know that, because how it overlaps with the committee structure. And I think the earlier conversation just having with councilor Clark was around that as well. Like if there's a if there's a majority of a committee in that of the six that are on this field trip, and the topic is in the committee that they're involved with, for example, if you're on housing and homelessness and we are doing a tour of six of us of all the safe rest villages and task sites, then there's a majority on that, that trip. And so it would be really difficult to ask a question without breaking the rule. Based on what I thought I heard from you.
24 Yeah. And I think you're correct that it depends on whether the topic is germane to the committee work.
25 And so I think it gets challenging when six people meet, even though it's not it's legal in terms of not being seven, which would be the majority and that would be above that would be quorum. When we meet because it's inevitable. Aren't you going to talk about some issue that's in some committee? And at any given moment, three of you could be on a committee, which on this committee that would be a majority, correct?
26 Yeah. I mean, that's a that's a fair point. But I think that I think awareness and cognizant cognizance of the issue, if you are really careful to limit discussion, I think it's an individual responsibility as well as a committee and council responsibility to limit the topic, to say something that is not related to a committee if you had a quorum. So I think you're right. It is really difficult, and.
27 I think I'm challenged to know how to do that, because I know all of these people, because we're working on the issues that impact the city, that are the main topics that take place in our committees. So it's odd to just hang out with the majority and not talk about the city's business. And so I think there's the legal interpretation, which I respect. And then there's this reality of social structures. And I think that we're challenged right now with that, in my opinion. And but what's more challenging to me when I listen to this is when it says the don'ts down here. Like, I, I think that me bringing up it's probably not okay for more than three of us to meet in any given time, seems to be ethically clean and clear. What's not always ethically clean and clear is when you look at some of these can't do's. Where did they go? Like serial communication? Like, I mean, that's kind of a harsh word, but but but meaning what? In person? Email, text about anything, anything going on in the city. And then if you talk to another person about it, I mean, is this is this the rule that the state legislature passed that everyone's having trouble interpreting? And then they didn't even get pass it for their own, they just passed it on to everybody besides themselves to try to figure out how to do that. That's the part that's really murky to me. I think we could get more clean and clear about quorum issues, and that would help this one. That's more difficult to operate in. I think that law that passed probably needs to go back to the drawing board. And now that people are actually trying to implement it, of course, but it's there. And then we write things that are difficult to let's see, they're not difficult to interpret. They're difficult to practice. It's like against human behavior. That makes sense. Yes, absolutely. Just thought I'd make this more murky. But I do want us to have a dialog about quorum. I'm I'm personally troubled with the fact that we can meet up to six people, can meet in a meeting of this council without the public knowing it. When any when most of the time that's six configuration would be a majority of a committee or two. I just think we're getting into territory that, in my opinion, is difficult to explain to the public. And that's just from practicing sunset laws. For a long time since I was on the school board, we had them. We had them with the last. The last council was easy. You could only talk to one person at a time. And so I got used to that. But I'm almost thinking it's almost the same with this one, because once you get to three, you're a majority in any given committee at any time. So. All right, so have fun with that everyone. Just want to get the conversation going.
28 Councilor pirtle-guiney.
29 Thank you. And I just want to clarify when you say vice president Koyama Lane the new laws, this is the 2023 law that we've been operating under for the last two years. Right? Or is there something in addition and interpretation that I'm missing?
30 No. Yeah. Thank you for clarifying by saying recently. Yeah, just talking about in the last couple years. Perfect.
31 I just want to clarify that. Linly councilor Clark was talking about trips, and I'm wondering if we have a precedent at the city of noticing a field trip like that, a group trip to do a tour. And if we have a way to publicly notice it so that our committees can go and information, gather together and ask questions and hopefully not debate in too much depth, because we know fewer people will be watching that than they would be a committee, for example, at the dais. But to at least allow folks the ability to go on a trip together and ask questions.
32 Yeah, I think the logistical challenge is the fact that the public has the right to attend. And so, I mean, we I feel like there might be technological ways to deal with it, but I'm not really I haven't thought through that. But that might that might be your challenge.
33 I know other governments do something like that where they'll go somewhere together and notice it, and that makes it okay. And maybe our limitation is that more people are paying attention to our meetings than, for example, metro's meetings. But I I'd love for us to look into what's possible there so that councilor Clark, you and others can have those really important trips without having to worry about who gets to go and who doesn't from your committee.
34 Well, and I don't want to be put in a situation where we have to provide transportation for anybody who wants to go.
35 Absolutely. No. Yeah. But it would be I think it would be interesting to see what the best practices are for other local governments. That's something that I'm happy to work on. And maybe our attorney team could help with. And I'm just wondering, vice president Koyama Lane, if this is something that you intend to share with our colleagues, because this I know I've heard our attorneys say all of this information to us before. This seems like the conversations that we've been having, but we haven't laid it out like this yet. Are you planning on there being changes to this, or is this something that we should share out to all of our colleagues after the meeting today?
36 The intention was to bring it to all of you and see what the conversation was. If there were more questions, if anything should be added, could be added. And we have linly here where we can do some of that in real time. And this is available to the public already so colleagues can look at it. It's already posted. And absolutely, I think this should go out to everyone, either through one of your offices, kind of like newsletters that you send to all the councilors or I mean, if it makes sense for this to go into. And now I'm wondering, would it make sense for this to go into our sort of rule book that we're putting together in governance through our resolutions? Do you have any thoughts on that?
37 Linly I think I think it's fine.
38 Yeah.
39 It's like an appendix sort of. Here, add it, add it in. I can see that. Maybe we do, you know, a footnote if we're going to get more information from linly on the questions that we've asked, we might, might, might want to do a footnote on the on site inspection or by the way, you need to if it's a quorum of the committee, you need to do public notice. You don't need to provide transportation, but maybe just a little bit more information. And we can do a footnote on this. But I think this is terrific, madam chair.
40 Do you have any specific thoughts about that?
41 I, you know, about sending it out or. I think that if we have something written down like this, we should certainly make sure that everybody has the same information and share it with our colleagues. If it's easier. If I send that out with a regular update, I'm happy to do that. I just want to make sure that we don't have this information at the exclusion of our colleagues.
42 Yeah, I'm happy to have my office send it out on behalf of governance. Also, once we add a little bit more to it.
43 It's really wonderful.
44 Councilor dunfee.
45 Thank you. A couple of well, I have two questions. One is small and vaguely petty, and one of them is a bigger sort of philosophical question. But the first one I'm reading here on things that the council can't do, and you specifically call out social media posts in which engaging in serial communications I have on occasion been tagged by the city of Portland, or whoever runs the city of Portland, saying, we passed a budget. Right. And then there's a thousand comments, and occasionally colleagues will jump into the comment section and be like, oh, I'm so thankful for this, or responding to a comment where somebody got it wrong. Does that potentially violate this rule now, like, is the act of being tagged in a social media post by a government or me tagging multiple people in a social media post, or me more than one person replying to comments.
46 So that comment reflects best practices in the trainings that have been done by entities and posted. And I put that in because I think there's certainly some possibility that that could be treated as a serial communication. If you start having a conversation is a tag. I suppose if you say I, councilor Dunphy, want to have policy x and you get six thumbs up from council members, that starts looking like deliberation to under this law, I would be I'd be wary of it. I think it's really it's tricky. Are you going to get a complaint about it? I, I can't predict right.
47 The fact that it's a complaint driven process means that we are operating from a position of fear at all times, that we are afraid we are going to off the wrong person, and we've given them a tool to be able to make our lives unpleasant. I have we considered filing suit about the enforcement of this. I personally think that it's more than just an annoyance, and I think it's genuinely infringing on our ability to do our jobs. And I'm wondering if this doesn't violate our home rule charter requirements, if it doesn't impinge on the legislature's first amendment rights for speech. And I'm wondering if your office has actually looked into any legal challenges to this.
48 I'm not aware that we have.
49 Okay. I'm I'm to the point where I'm genuinely interested in not playing nice about this, but trying to push back for our own rights, because I really believe that this I mean, for example. And I apologize, colleagues, but, you know, this new form of government was largely built around representation, transparency and inclusion, right? Making sure that the community has an opportunity. And when you pair the new structure with these public meeting laws, we have situations where historically, for example, a colleague would have presented a budget amendment and said, hey, I'm thinking about closing the community music center. What do you think about that? And they would have gone and talked about it. Instead. We do it in a public forum because this is the only place where we can actually have that debate with our colleagues, but the public doesn't know that that's what this actually happening. They and then we wasted half of our time on our one budget hearing, hearing from people protesting against an amendment that probably would if for conversations behind closed doors had happened, we would have known was never a right answer. And now that means we spent hours of our day and we lost the opportunity for genuine engagement from the community. So I'm I'm feeling quite burdened by these rules. I feel quite threatened by them. I think it is a dramatic overreach on the part of the ogc, and I think that the city should have a little bit more of an aggressive role in trying to figure out what the actual answers are to these.
50 Chair, can I just respond to councilor? So, councilor Dunphy, the league of Oregon cities has been very, very involved in this. Oh, sorry. Were you going to say that they have challenged ogc? They've had correspondence back and forth and it's been nasty. Yeah. So if we did anything we should probably coordinate with the league to just make sure we're all doing the same thing on the same page. I don't know that they've considered filing suit, but they're certainly in a I was going to say a nasty word match over this, so we should coordinate. But I agree with you because it basically we're just hamstrung. We're totally hamstrung.
51 Absolutely.
52 Vice chair Ryan.
53 Yeah, mine's in a similar category. I just wanted to keep the dialog going. When you mentioned like on social, are you talking about the city social meeting your councilor Page? Yeah. In any of your social not your personal.
54 Sure.
55 I think that also could be in here. Or maybe it's a an appendix, but at least in the last council we were lectured to quite a bit about separating your personal social media from your public social media. One's your own living room at home, and one is clearly the transparency for the public to see. And you have to keep like, really lovely comments about the person that has that page. You have to keep them on there because it's all part of the public domain. Unless they say a bad word or something. But with personal you have obviously more freedom. And I just want to say that that's the one that I've always focused on, is making sure I don't get into any dialog on anyone's personal page about anything political. Yeah, but that's an people seem to understand that. But it's good to keep reminding us of that. Especially because some of my colleagues are. So that's like they have really deep, deep, deep social presence. Yeah. Okay. That but I wanted to make sure you were referring to the government pages. The public pages.
56 Yeah, absolutely. I have a councilor Dunphy instagram account. And then I have my personal instagram account that nobody can find. And I have a campaign, one that is fully separate. So it is me trying to figure out which voice am I responding to, and sometimes switching accounts pretty quickly and trying to remove my tags from certain things and try to replace tags and other ones. But god, I hate social media in the best of circumstances, and to have to now weigh three of them and worry and like. Also check the comments before I comment on something else that I've been tagged in. Sounds. I would rather just throw my phone in the river.
57 Well and you can call me any time about such things that you have. I agree with you, but people do tag you on your personal pages. What I'm trying to say, and you have to be really careful to not respond to that. If they tag your councilor Page, that's different. Yeah, okay. Am I the only one that cares about this whole what forum is though? Because I, I to me it's more of a lens test. It just feels like we're sure seven is definitely over the line because there's 12 of us. But again, it just feels like it doesn't pass the smell test or the lens test to me when we meet and we talk about the city's business of any sort and it's more than a quorum of a committee.
58 I don't know that. I mean, I don't know that people understood that in the old city council form, that commissioners could only meet with one of their colleagues at any given time. That's what I was saying. Yeah. And I don't think people realize that. And I think that's pretty I think that's also true of how the county does it now. Right. But then they look at the legislature and recognize, you know, the democrats have a supermajority, and that means that two thirds of the almost two thirds of the house can meet in one big room and not talk about things, and people don't really I don't think people I mean, I don't necessarily get it why those are different and how why one body would be exempt and another body would be different, especially considering the scale and scope of the questions that the city councilors or, you know, whether it's the city of Portland, which we're a pretty big jurisdiction, but compared to the state or compared to molalla city council, like they're making small decisions and they're far more hamstrung than the $100 billion state budget.
59 Can I respond on the difference? It's because the great state of Oregon has a closed primary, and there's two main parties, democrat or republican, and they're caucusing. We're not a caucusing system because we're nonpartisan. So because we're nonpartisan, we would have different rules than the two than the party structure. With that question. That's why they can do it.
60 They can do.
61 It because that's the way the democrats and the republicans want it.
62 I hear that, yeah.
63 And they're not going to change that down there because it benefits all of them.
64 Councilor councilor I was in the councilor Ryan I was in the queue to talk about something else, but I'll just respond to your ask about whether anybody else cares about the quorum number. And I don't particularly want us to artificially manipulate what equals a quorum. Six seven equals a quorum. Six is less than that. But I do think that we all need to be cognizant of how close to the line we push, and knowing that any one person talking to any one other person would equal seven. I think folks need to self-regulate and be careful. And also we need to remember that we do have two quorums. We have a quorum of council, and we have a quorum of any given committee. I guess that means we have nine quorums. So when I put groups together of counselors to talk about something, I try really hard in my council president role to make sure I'm looking not just at council, but at every single committee to make sure or every single relevant committee to make sure that if we're having a conversation about a topic, I don't inadvertently put a quorum of that committee in a room, I don't know which groups of six you're referring to. I think there are a number of places where that could happen, but I would hope that our colleagues are doing that same work of making sure that they don't have a quorum of a committee in a room if they're talking about a topic related to that committee. And I certainly would share your concerns if that was happening, but I'd rather not artificially change what a quorum is, but rather to have us all think about quorums more broadly as both committee quorums and council quorum.
65 I think that's it. Right now we're only thinking about it as the whole council, but not as committees. Yeah.
66 And we need to be all we all need to be keeping in mind both. I had jumped in the queue just to tag on to the conversation that councilors Dunphy and Clark were having about the changes that we need at the state legislature, because I agree, and that's something that there was legislation to address this session which didn't pass. And I would just encourage us, as we are working with the government affairs team, to put together our legislative agenda, not for next long session, but for February, where I've heard rumors that there's a chance that this topic could come back up to all of us as we have our individual conversations, talk to the team about that being a part of our agenda in the legislature. And I'd ask you, councilor Clark, as our representative to the league of cities, to try to elevate this on their agenda as well. Obviously, we need to have a full council discussion about the final agendas, and ogre will bring things to us to have that conversation. But as we do, our individual conversations about what might be a part of that, I think it would be great for all of us to include that as the governance committee that's paying attention to these issues.
67 Councilor Dunphy.
68 I just a question.
69 Occurred to me to ask linly with regard to a quorum of committees. Committees inherently are not they're they're deliberative bodies, but they're not decision making bodies. Right. The at best, a well, maybe I'm wrong. My interpretation of a committee is that they are at making recommendations to the broader body, which is the actual decision making body, and that there's no situation in which a committee will have the final say on anything. Does that mean that the state law would still apply in the same way, though?
70 Yes. So it applies to bodies that have the ability to make decisions or recommendations to another governing body. So for example, the planning commission, they don't have the ability to make final decisions, but they similarly make recommendations to the council and are subject to the public.
71 Planning committee had a subcommittee on transportation, and the three of them went and got a beer that is now a quorum of the subcommittee of the planning committee.
72 Yes. If they if they formally have a subcommittee, okay.
73 Something like that. Yeah. If it's okay. So it doesn't the it's not a matter of decisions. It's decision makers.
74 It's it is because the definition includes both the a governing body of a public body. Both can be a body that makes decisions or a body that makes recommendations to another governing body of a public body. Okay, okay. Yes, it runs deep.
75 Are there other city.
76 Councils or county commissions that have subcommittees in the state of Oregon? We're the largest. Legislative.
77 I don't think. I know I don't have the information to respond to that. I may have like six months ago, but it's not there.
78 Okay, okay. Thank you.
79 All right. Thank you for the conversation, colleagues. I hope none of you are offended if I stop liking all of your social media posts now.
80 Just kidding. From your personal to personal, that's fine.
81 I almost feel like we need a whole nother sheet about personal versus city social media. I started wondering there, does this get messy and tricky when you have a campaign account? But on that you are discussing the city, which someone would do as they're running.
82 I would if you have questions about that, let's talk about that outside of public session.
83 Maybe it's a whole nother form. Okay. Yeah. As we have as we continue to have this conversation, there's this balance of making sure that there's transparency and the public has access to our meetings and to information, and then also just the need for good governance. And part of that is it requires, I mean, hopefully it requires that we're collaborating and communicating with each other. So continuously trying to find where that spot is, where we can have both. And I love the way that in real time, we watched council president and councilor Clark think creatively and be open. And I think that's one thing we need to do, like when talking about the trips, you know, that obviously I think that's something that the public would say we would love for, to see our committee members go do that. We want to see you guys working together and hands on learning. And how do we how do we make that happen? And also make sure that it's noticed appropriately. So I just saw there the ability to think like, okay, how can we make it work and be above board? I think that's a great way to come at this. All right. I think we're ready for the next item. Diego, can you please read it?
84 Item two best practices for collaborative policy making.
85 Thank you. All right. Some may wonder why I'm bringing this issue forward, given that we are two separate bodies with distinct roles and responsibilities, while respecting those roles and responsibilities, you know that I deeply believe in collaboration and co-creation. I think it can make our work stronger when we have more perspectives in our processes and voices at our tables. The work of identifying potential policy ideas is one that benefits both sides, I think, and working together, being able to bring perspectives and lived experience. And there are issues that we on council cannot know about related to the impact of city service delivery. And there are issues that only elected officials representing their their districts. We're really close to our constituents, issues that will be able to speak to that. Really, only the community can fully understand or know. So I bringing both sets of knowledge together with the community's direct engagement, will only result in better and more impactful policies for our city. And so I invite my colleagues here and eventually the full council, to engage in this discussion so that our common practice can be developed and implemented, and we can be thinking about best practices for working together. So I believe we have a couple folks here or we have one one person here who. I'm excited to bring up. We also, all of you have the attachment or I can pass it out. That is a draft. Would you like to introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about your work on this?
86 Yes. Hi. Chair Koyama Lane vice chair. Ryan. Council president pirtle-guiney councilor Dunphy and councilor Clark. It's great to see you all. My name is tate white. I use she they pronouns and I'm a senior strategic project manager working with city operations. I've been in a role focused on citywide asset management this year, but last year I was focused heavily on thinking about the mayor council form of government and working with a team to look at best practices from other cities. And so as part of that process, we looked a lot at the city of minneapolis because they had a shift, a similar change in their form of government in 2021, and it increased the separation between their legislative and executive branches. And they had a lot less time to transition and were very generous in speaking with us about their experience. And one thing they recommended was the concept of a legislative objective or, sorry, a legislative directive, excuse me. And part of that was a way to have a structured process for the councilors to make requests to the administration for information or subject matter expertise. It was separate from a more informal kind of informational request, but it went into more depth. And so this process diagram I want to preface, it was made in one afternoon. It was a draft for discussion of how we could see this applying to the city of Portland. So it's not all encompassing. It represents one policy pathway, probably in an ideal scenario in terms of timing, more complex or different types of legislation might require a lot more time. And as we all know, policy development is a very robust process with community engagement throughout and then evaluation after. So this is not reflective of that full policy development process, but it is meant to show an option where we could as as you talked about. Very well, chair Koyama Lane, where we could work together between the legislative and executive branches and help develop really robust policy, because ultimately we have a shared responsibility to make sure we're doing that and sort of evaluating and making sure that policy achieves the desired outcomes. So I'm happy to answer any questions.
87 Thank you so much. So this is coming before us as a draft, something that we can look over and think how, if and how we can see this being helpful. Any questions we have or concerns? Is it possible for you to walk us through some of the different steps quickly?
88 Absolutely. All right. So I did see that this was posted. So members of the public can see it. So it starts with early on. No idea. Development a beauty of our new form of government is you are connecting with your constituents quite regularly and you know kind of their key issues. You have your own policy priorities. And so at any point you might be working with your own staff and your own expertise to develop policy, but you might have questions for the administration about what's been done before, what they're doing now. And so this is a process where you can document that and sort of a formal request that goes to executive leadership. And then that moves on to this idea of a step two. And one reason I made these bubbles that were sort of separated is I don't know how much time is in between these steps, you know, that's dependent on specific processes and many other people. And so in that review and research stage, you're allowing time for all the various parties that need to be involved in this process to review. And it provides a little sort of upfront notice to all of all of the stakeholders involved in this process. And in here you can see you can see city attorney's office is involved to identify legal implications. You can have folks review to note any process requirements, different things like that. And then the step three is the service area engagement. And so reaching out to the deputy city administrators and helping to notify them of, you know, they can identify what subject matter experts really need to be involved in the conversation. They can help flag any major issues, help just provide the information you need as elected officials to do your job well, and then and again, some of these might be overlapping. You then move on to step four, which is when you're really working on drafting a resolution. Probably this is most applicable to resolutions. It would work for ordinances, but the timeline might be a little longer. And then yeah, and throughout you can see that through this process you have the option. Of course, given all the challenges we've been talking about today with public meeting law and the new rules, you could choose to talk about these policy issues at a committee meeting throughout that process. And then ultimately you're building up to either an official committee meeting or if it's moving on to council and a council hearing.
89 Thank you so much for that overview. I would love to hear from my colleagues. What's coming up, any questions you have? Councilor Dunphy?
90 Yeah.
91 So the idea of a legislative directive is this, I mean, as a bad analogy, but is this is this equivalent to the bill ideas that the legislature, the state legislature, would put together ahead of a session in order to try and get like, you know, I a state senator, I want to ban flavored tobacco. I'm going to put together a thing, you know, rough idea of like, what the hell I'm trying to actually accomplish. And that would be a direct input into the executive side of things, as this. Is this functionally a way to ask for additional information from the administrative side of stuff in a sort of organized way?
92 I think. So I don't have the expertise to say that it's the exact same thing, but I think that is, in theory, the idea. I mean, I, I mentioned that there are more informal requests for information that could be done that wouldn't have to go through such a formal process. But but yes.
93 Councilor clerk.
94 Thank you, madam chair. I think this is a helpful guide, but I think a lot of us are a little more organic than that. And maybe spontaneous. So let me just give you an example for today. In my committee, we had a resolution that was based on a budget note that was done quickly with meeting. We didn't meet the deadline, so it was a 3/5 vote in our committee to get it on the agenda. And it was in response to something that's happened, a very immediate need. It's all about the transportation package or lack thereof. And what was interesting is I we did or I did work with the appropriate bureau just to make sure everything was okay. But then we had audience participation. We had a witness who testified and made a suggestion, and we incorporated that suggestion into the resolution today. So it was a very organic process and it was very successful and done quickly, because we're kind of in an emergency situation in terms of transportation finance. So just to say that there this might be the ideal on paper, but it may be not the way it works in reality, that there isn't time to have a thorough review by legal or whomever, and we just kind of feel our way through it. Hopefully we're not stepping into anything, but I appreciate having a guide. Yeah.
95 That's great, councilor Clark, am I able to respond to that? Is that okay? I think that's great. I was there for that meeting. And so I think it's a great example. And in that instance, I think that's an example of something that could move very quickly and might not like. It would be these steps early on there, there would find like there would be an opportunity to identify that alignment and that ability to not have to go through a lot of process. And so, yeah, I, I think it's a great example of something that could still happen and wouldn't have to be overburdened in any way.
96 Thank you, councilor Ryan.
97 Thank you. I like that dialog you just had. So clearly, there's going to be urgent issues that you can't follow. This best practice. For me, there's a missing step. And that's the step before step one. So one reason I wanted to be on the new council was because I knew it would give me more time to be out in the community and less time in city hall. Very good for your health. And so I've really enjoyed being out in the district more than being in city hall. It was from being out in the district and doing something I wanted to do last term, but I didn't have as much time, and that was to listen to those storefront owners that I heard in 20 to 2024 that felt like no one was listening to them. So and I'm like, well, I can tell you why, because there's only five of us. So I thought when I if I get into this role, I want to do that. So going out and having a lot of dialog organically policy came from listening to them. It's not like councilor Ryan wants to micro. What is a is a really wonderful policy that's floating around the universe right now, and everyone's excited about it. I want stuff that's organic to Portland, Oregon in 2025 that's going to move our city continually forward, and the only way to do that is to be out in our districts, listening to our constituents. And from that you can produce, in my opinion, better policy because you hear what the problem is, and then you're trying to figure out if we have a system that can solve their problems. And it was really clear to me that the way we respond to storefronts we don't have in the enterprise a very responsive system. So how can we figure out the policy that would get us towards better customer service to those struggling storefront owners who are paying lease money? They're like renters and they're trying to just make ends meet. I'm giving you weaving an example, so I'm sure you already know that. But I think as this document continues to get some feedback and could evolve just like the last one, maybe there could be something incorporated into the into this document. In my opinion, the best policy comes from the organic dialog you have out in the community. And it's actually one of those sessions in December at PSU. That was my favorite one out of all of them, where we had that dialog with the curriculum of the whoever the professor was or consultant that was instructing us in that session.
98 Thank you, vice chair Ryan, I think you're absolutely right. As I was dusting off the cobwebs of this work, since I've been doing other work, I printed out the powerpoint from that Saturday PSU workshop because they talk about that full policy process, and I was a little nervous because this was not necessarily made for a committee. It was made for very like specific purpose. And that's one reason I wanted to preface that this is just a small piece of a broader process. So you're absolutely correct.
99 Yeah. So the community engagement pieces aren't in here.
100 Not at all.
101 Okay. And maybe that's a qualifier or.
102 Yeah. Yeah, definitely. I tried to mention that early on, but I probably didn't do a very good job. So I appreciate you bringing it up again.
103 And maybe you did and I just missed it. Yeah. But I couldn't I couldn't I didn't experience that when I was reading this.
104 Yeah. No it's definitely divorced from that really crucial context.
105 Are you suggesting that we add something to it at the beginning, like community engagement or listen to the public or something like that?
106 Yeah, I think that I actually think tate's capturing this. Do you want do you have enough to give it a go?
107 Yes, definitely. I actually and I worked on policy process presentations for the community and employee town halls last year where that was that was the first thing we spoke about. And so there are diagrams that exist.
108 It's my own practice. For me. That's the step one. I never want to be a solution looking for a problem. I want to actually really understand what the problem is and then find the solution. We have too much of that right now. And body politic where there's, you know, exciting little policies all over the country, and then we pluck them and want to fit them into Portland. Well, maybe that's not what Portland needs right now.
109 So absolutely.
110 Thank you for all that, vice chair Ryan. It reminds me how much I love just talking through governance stuff with you. And someone's got it. Yeah. I mean, what I'm thinking is seeing how we can incorporate that. I mean, even as we've talked about how a bill becomes a law in the mockup that we've we've done for that, you know, we have ideas coming not just from councilors, but from the community, from the executive side. And depending on how much we I think we added in here. And then that also can be the another thing we put on our governance agenda list of talking about bringing that to governance committee. Also, what is community engagement look like? What are we adopting as our our practices?
111 I appreciate that because it also, I think, pivots us to what the current council is and the old form. We didn't have a lot of time to do what we're talking about, like I mentioned earlier. So we were keeping up with the bureaus we were overseeing and things would come from the bureaus. Then if you were a good commissioner, you would have them take a pause and ask good questions about what the community was thinking. And you could usually tell if they did that work or not, and then you would stay on top of it as a person representing the community, not not the bureau. And it was tricky. I found it kind of fun. But this role, you get to do that all the time. Yeah.
112 Councilor Dunphy, thanks.
113 I'll just note that I think that this is a great document. It is better than half of the textbooks I got in my poli sci degree at PSU, but it will. It is also, I will just note that it does not, and probably should not adequately convey how hard it is to pass a bill into a law, even when everybody agrees with you. For example, this austere body unanimously supported my ordinance last month, on or last week on on the noise code, you know, adding emergency clause and getting 12 votes is incredible. It still took six months in this body to make that happen and five years of community advocacy. So it should be hard to make a new law that is part of it. And this is really helpful for understanding some of the basic mechanics. But, you know, I don't think anybody at home reading this should think, oh, great. And in six weeks I can have a new law. It ain't going to happen that way. That's all.
114 Thank you.
115 Thank you for this conversation. Something that I'll add is when we are able to put processes and how things flow in writing, it feels helpful to me. And in general, I think it is equitable for the public and for anyone else that is going to be sitting on this dais with us eventually, who might not know exactly who to ask or what the process is. And I will say, I've been able to answer some of these questions, but I really came in in January. Like, not really sure how to how to do this if I have an idea. And so I think when we do have something like rules a book that that people can look through, that is it ultimately is more equitable to make sure that we have that. And also knowing it won't always things won't always look like this. It'll go it'll be longer or at times shorter if needed. Things will organically, spontaneously happen. But even having a first place to look as a possibility, I think can be helpful.
116 Even if you have something to say right now.
117 Yeah, I just want to ask a question. I notice there's a term here enterprise policy. I really like that. But what does it mean? What is it at the very, very bottom under legislative directives? Last line we're talking about what a legislative directive generally seeks. And it says or enterprise policy.
118 Can you speak to that?
119 I like.
120 That I think that is directly borrowed from city of minneapolis.
121 Has a nice ring to it. Enterprise policy. I don't know what it means.
122 Any policies that would then be adjusted, a legislative directive generally seeks the development of data, information, research, study, evaluation or analysis for the purpose of informing pending or potential legislation or enterprise policy. Something new. Something new. Yeah. How things a policy or process, how things are being ran on the enterprise side. We can look into that.
123 Yeah.
124 Make sure we explain it better or take it out.
125 I mean my guess would be it, you know, the administration has little p policy that they're doing to do their work. Well. And this is representative of the legislative body and the executive collaborating. And so maybe that's what makes it an enterprise policy. But that is just a guess.
126 I probably should have clarified this a little bit more at the beginning, but just wanted to say that the point is that we talk today. This is an early initial discussion. Raise this idea, raise this chart for consideration. This is something that my office and council president's office has been talking about. The next step is council president's chief of staff is working on doing a briefing for all of the chief of staff's presenting it, making sure that they're part of the development process. And then there would be a discussion with the dca and executive side. And then once it goes through all those steps, it would come back to us as the governance committee for recommend to see if we want to recommend it to full council. Councilor Ryan. Yeah.
127 So this document that you got from minneapolis, correct?
128 Yes. I dca morrissey and I created this and we adopted basically the process from minneapolis to and we created the diagram. But the process is from minneapolis for sure. And other cities with mayor council form of government have similar processes to this.
129 So my lens on this I have more experience in life the last 30 years being executive than I do. Obviously as a legislator that's new, just this last year. So I'm sensitive to implementation and how it impacts the bureau and all good system change includes those from the ground up in the decision making or in the change. And in this new form of government, I've had I've been audible about this up here, that it feels like we dive in in a kind of a micro way, and that's made me uncomfortable. And it's because we haven't had time to listen to more people within the bureau on what the impact of that change would be. Even a resolution last week like that has budget implications, and that's not here. So it's hard for me to support something that's not transparent about a budget implication. And so I don't know if this has enough teeth in it to ensure that we're being thoughtful about how is this different once it passes. What is the budget implication. Because staff equals budget implication. So it takes people who should get paid to do their jobs. Obviously, to carry this out. Do we have the staffing model to carry out what we're saying? And if we don't, can we repurpose the staffing model in consultation with union on what that looks like? I feel like we're missing those steps, and I worry that we're going to pass too many policies that will not be implemented and will be like Salem. Salem passes. I'm sure people know this by now. They pass a lot of policy that's never implemented and they call it a day. What really matters is the implementation and the results. And so we don't want to be as big as Salem, where the legislator and the admin side and all the agencies are so far apart, and it seems like it moves at such a slow pace. We need to be more responsive because we're local government. And so I don't want to I don't want us to get too formal like Salem, because I don't think it's a best practice. I think our practice is better because we're more responsible to our constituents. Because they see it, they feel it. They they, they are invoiced and they run into us and tell us what they think, no matter what. So it's like we're we can't hide. And so I just think that when we pass a policy, I'm, I'm concerned that we're not spending enough time in this development on what the implementation is like.
130 Can I make a suggestion here? So maybe in step two we add to a it says legal implications, maybe budget implications. Would that.
131 Yeah this feels legal and policy process accurate. But it's missing that operational lens and implementation lens. And we're about action again because we're local government. We don't have the luxury of not implementing what we pass. I had something that took 18 months that another cities took three years. But this fool that passed it said we could do it in six months. I'll always be known as not implementing something quickly, when in fact 18 months was really fast. When it comes to government to do something new and different, don't ever make that mistake, colleagues. And so we need to see how things can get implemented.
132 I think it's great. Comment. You're getting exactly to one of the core reasons, I think why these are implemented to help make that connection more and have policy be informed and more tied to implementation. And yeah, I think right now the budget comes in at step four. And this would this was reviewed by cfo bree as well as dca oliveira. But I think it needs that broader eye from from many more people. And then I just wanted to address in terms of having the staff to implement something like this and its own budget implications as a process, being able to support and facilitate best practices like these is one reason the council operations team was designed, and that's part of its core focus is helping to be that bridge with the administration. So yes, it's it needs more staff, I think, to really fulfill its, its true potential. But but that work and then I think the executive administrative side has also been preparing to be able to support something like this. So I think this is complementary to other scaffolding we've tried to put in place to support this form of government.
133 Thanks. And I know even with when I was overseeing an organization with a board and it was a big change, I would have to provide the strategic plan on that, the three year plan, what success looks like with metrics that we're going to measure. We never passed anything unless we had measurements connected to it. Like, if you can't measure the success of this policy, then why pass it? I, I would love to work on something in my spare time that says no more ballot measures should be on the ballot, unless we have a clarity about the strategic plan, what success looks like, what metrics we're going to measure. So then people can be more clear eyed about what they're voting for. So I think we should demonstrate that in our policy work.
134 Thank you. Vice chair Ryan, I wanted to clarify because now I'm worried I misspoke. So to be clear, this attached document was developed by tate white and our dca, sarah morrissey, as a concept development related to policy development. So I'm not I didn't work on it, but I'm happy to have it here in front of us today. So I apologize for misspeaking council president and I are our offices are in communication about how this is going to be coming before chiefs. And this is the first initial discussion just to raise the idea for consideration. It's our chance to add to it, give input, ask questions, decide if and how we move forward with this.
135 No, I appreciate this. I think that we're so close to the action on city council, unlike, say, Salem. Like we're close to the workload. Like we can tell when this is going to impact the workload. And so when I was in the private sector, if you did that, they would say back to you, okay, what are we taking off our plate like? There's only so many hours in the day. So I think in this form of governmen, we should be a little bit more responsible to see that through. That's my point that I'm trying to make. Yeah.
136 Thank you, councilor Pirtle-guiney.
137 Thank you. Chair. I just I want to make sure as we're looking at this and I'm not sure what the plans are moving forward for this, but as we're sharing it, that we're clear about what it is because it talks about being a sheet for how we create legislative directives, but it actually is just using a legislative directive. It looks like to me to then lay out in a different way from the document that you brought to us previously, how to do the work of drafting an ordinance or a resolution. And right now we don't have anything called a legislative directive. We certainly could create something. I think this is work that many of us have done more informally, reaching out to the dca's to say, how do we where are you at with something now? We might want to make this change. How does that work? And as we create documents to help our colleagues and the public and future councilors understand the work of the new Portland city council. I want to make sure we know what we're creating and how it interacts with other things. So I just as I'm as I'm reading this, what I see in the headings, what I see written on the page and what I hear you al, as my colleagues talking about, are actually different.
138 Are you able to be specific about where there are things in this document in conflict with?
139 Not that it's in conflict, but that this really looks to me like it is about another way of laying out how one might create and pass a resolution or an ordinance. I don't think this is a bad thing, but we had a lot of conversation about how to create legislative directives, and that's not actually what I'm what I'm seeing. The bulk of this sheet being about. Again, that's okay. But I want to make sure that we have, you know, we have the initial document that council operations sent out about how to do our work. We have the document you brought to us last week. We now have this document. I want to make sure we don't have three different things that tell us how to do the same work in different ways. So we may need at some point to decide what it is that we want as the way that we generally showcase how we do our work.
140 Vice chair Ryan.
141 Yeah, that's a good dialog. So there's this is what I'm thinking. The difference between resolution ordinance. So some resolutions eventually become an ordinance. They mature into that. And I don't think there should be I know on school board you can't pass a major ordinance unless you worked with the admin side to provide the administrative directives when you're passing the ordinance. So it becomes one package with resolutions. I think it's responsible to have timelines that suggest that you need that strategic plan. You need those administrative directives. I think strategic plan I sometimes use when I should be saying administrative directives. Sorry about that. And those metrics that we want to measure. So I, I think that they're both important. But I do think there's a loose it's a looser with a resolution than it is with an ordinance. I still think we need to be responsible with the resolution that dictates where we're going. Unless it's a proclamation. You know, this is I guess pride month is July 2nd now. But anyway, this is pride month. So that's a proclamation. But when it's a resolution that's leading to something deeper and it's leading to some system change in the enterprise, I think we should be responsible to hint towards that, especially if there's budget implications.
142 Yeah, absolutely. And if I may, thank you, council president pirtle-guiney, for contextualizing this more. Because because you're correct. This is a very specific sort of looking at legislative directives as a best practice and looking at what it could look like within our existing processes. And I think what you're tasked with and what you're thinking about is much broader than this. And so it's important to remember that. And if in case it is helpful, I think what this came from is the administration wanting to support you in the best way they can and thinking, you know, this is an opportunity to better track different requests that we're getting and be more responsive, help keep you more responsive. It's kind of similar to your own conversations about tracking your own legislation and your committee discussions. So I think it's all all of us are trying to continually improve and work better together.
143 Councilor Clark.
144 I just want to put a plug in for if we're going to integrate these, that we make it as simple as possible, as short and sweet and simple as possible, with the fewest words possible. Thank you.
145 I'm just adding.
146 And so for this, this draft, this idea it is I'm looking at how an idea comes before council where we were on that. This is really the work of that a sponsor needs to do. Councilor. And part is part of this to help the dca's sort through the different requests that they're getting. I'm assuming that it's quite different depending on the office. And is that part of what this could help with?
147 I mean, that's that's one benefit, I think. I think it allows, you know, there are 12 councilors and so it allows for a process for everyone to make a request. And I think you'll notice something that I think minneapolis uses is if more councilors are interested in in a policy research or having more information on something specific, then that's a way to prioritize that. So it does provide, instead of multiple one off conversations with individual dcas it, I guess we're getting to that enterprise level conversation where it allows for an opportunity to organize things a bit more efficiently, and then it also gives something for councilors to be able to look at, to be like, oh, where is that policy topic idea that we did a legislative directive on that? Where is that spreadsheet? I can see what the status is. Obviously, I'm these are hypotheticals, but that is a potential of how this could work.
148 That's great. And I know that I love the idea of this being a way that can support collaboration. Also, we've talked about the hope for that and how we can do that while also respecting honoring quorum laws. And the way that it's happened for me at times is by reaching out to someone in the city, an employee, and then them saying, oh, actually, councilor Dunphy also cares about the bathroom code revision stuff, and they're making those connections. I love the idea of formalizing it. And there being a clear way to track some of that. Yeah.
149 I would hope that this is going to keep evolving with crisp, simple, understandable, digestible language, as councilor Clark reminded. So don't quote me verbatim. I also don't think it's theoretical anymore, or even hypothetical, because we just experienced like two months of this. So I think we should have some humility to kind of look through what happened from April through June. And it could be a really healthy it would be a healthy work session if we had the mayor and dc up here talking about this so we can keep improving upon the system in how we work together, because this is a partnership, is what you're reading here between the whole enterprise, the upstairs, the Portland building and how can the council efficiently, elegantly work within that system? How can we improve upon what we did? Very good work in the first six months, but we now have some something that's not hypothetical anymore to learn from. So I wish that maybe this is a retreat topic. I don't know, but this is big, and I think that it takes more dialog. Obviously it will go beyond this committee, but I think we're getting somewhere to really improve the efficiency of our new form of government with this document. Thank you for bringing that. Glad you brought this. Yeah.
150 Thank you for your work. And thanks to dca, morrissey, who I know is watching us virtually right now.
151 Thank you.
152 Thank you. All right, colleagues, I want to keep you informed on what is happening in the government. Reset RFP request for proposal process. So I have a short update. The procurement process is being used to identify a consultant to work with us as a full council to increase our effectiveness. And in our our work together. The update is that six responses were received and approved for evaluation and evaluation. Committee representing community. Some member from gtac is included in there. Council and city operations will meet this week for the first part of the review process. Each evaluator will score each proposal independently using the evaluation criteria laid out in the RFP. Evaluators then have two weeks to evaluate the proposals that the committee then holds a scoring meeting and contractor selection is made based on the highest scored proposal, and once a selection is made based on scores, procurement will post the notice of intent to award publicly seven days posting period and begin contract drafting and finalizing. The goal is to have the contract finalized in August. I know it's later than we were. At least I was hoping. But it is, I think, good to go through this process and then as soon as we can, we'll set dates for our work together in the future. And additionally, as we continue to address questions, discuss best practices, develop agreements for each other. My team has been in contact with the city attorney's office, about to how to best formalize our decisions and policy. At our next meeting, I'll be bringing bringing some options for how we might want to move forward, solidifying our decisions for review and discussion. So our next meeting together will be Monday, July 21st at 2:30 p.m. And with that, the meeting of the governance committee. Oh yes.
153 Wait, wait, I have my hand up.
154 I apologize, councilor Clark, please hop in there.
155 That's okay. I, I just wanted to raise an issue, and I hope it's appropriate to raise it here. Regarding this retreat, I'm hoping that we can have this retreat before we make any big decisions about reorganizing ourselves. Our committees or our council meetings or schedules or and maybe even our council priorities. I just I hope that we can have this retreat. I have high hopes for it, but but have that before we, you know, leap into any substantive kinds of things. I guess that was a message I'm sending.
156 Would you like to burst her bubble? Council president?
157 Councilor, I hear that. And by the nature of scheduling, that may be the inevitable, because I am struggling to find a work session when everybody, or at least most people, can attend. But I will share with you that you have some colleagues who are pushing very hard for that work session to happen as soon as possible, and for the restructure to happen as soon as possible. So I, I think we have a few different pieces we need to balance. One of our colleagues has filed something to come, I believe, to this committee about committee structure, standalone from the council meeting and committee schedule piece. We need the work session on the council meeting and committee schedule piece. And there's this broader retreat conversation. And I don't think that the order of those I don't think those will come up in the order we would want them to. So we'll need to have some more conversations about how to get the cadence right and also get the conversations moving quickly.
158 I appreciate the challenge that you face in scheduling all these things.
159 I didn't know that we were pushing back until August on on this process until just now.
160 So I'm sorry, madam chair. When do when is the review of the six applications? I'm sorry. Maybe I missed that.
161 No, it the committee will meet this week and then each.
162 Who's the committee?
163 So there's someone from my council. My office. Is there someone from your office? From the scoring?
164 Not that I know of, but I've only heard about this process as we've talked about it in committee since we initially put it forward.
165 Your chief of staff has been part of the discussion around all of this. Cassie, are you part of that selection committee?
166 No. Okay.
167 Cassie is my chief of staff, and she said no, I'm glad you said no. Just because I feel like I would.
168 Let me.
169 I shouldn't have asked the question.
170 Why? Didn't mean to complicate this. I was just.
171 No, it's a really good question.
172 Wanting to know that I was just looking at the schedule and just when the when the review committee will meet, when those decisions will be made. And. Yep, that's all.
173 Mary is here to answer.
174 Go ahead mary.
175 Are you here to answer?
176 So the committee will meet this week. And then the.
177 Great hi, mary lee councilor Koyama Lane office. The procurement folks asked us to be a little circumspect about the actual names of the panel, because evaluators should be anonymous. So instead of identifying individuals, we identified sectors. But I think we've the cat's out of the bag. So there'll be a representative from vice president Koyama Lane representative from vice chair ryan's offices. Someone representing the administrative side of things, and someone from the community who has experience on the tech.
178 This is why dca morrissey wrote me very clear talking points that I read, because we're not supposed to be specific.
179 It's really to provide anonymity so that people aren't lobbying raters to say, oh, don't you like me best those kinds of things? And to protect the raiders ability to be independent. I think with the people that we're in, the representation we're talking about, I think we're probably safe on this. And as councilor Koyama Lane said, we're meeting this week with purchasing to get trained and told, and then everybody will rate. And if we can get it done faster, we will. But moving this process into a full blown solicitation by necessity causes some extra time to happen. And we understand the urgency and will push as hard as we can.
180 Thank you, madam chair. I could see that we can certainly expedite having more council meetings or scheduling them, but the big decisions about changing the committee structure or establishing council priorities, it just seems like we might want to wait till we have a chance to spend a little time in the retreat together. So that's my only comment. Thank you.
181 Mary, thanks for coming up and answering that question. And I understand, I think it was good to be transparent about the fact that we have a committee that's going to make the decision, and it's of course, you mentioned my office, so I, I will say that that felt good to provide balance with perspective. And so I want to thank you for that. Is there did I hear it right. There are four people on the committee.
182 Five someone from my office. Can we clarify that again? Someone from my office. Someone from councilor Ryan's office.
183 Your office? Councilor ryan's office, community member from gtac and two from. You know, internal administrative side.
184 Okay.
185 Thank you.
186 That makes sense.
187 Any other questions about. The government reset RFP process? All right. And with that, the meeting of the governance committee is adjourned. Thank you.