like discuss this correspondence maybe that's something we can move towards the fortune upon agenda where we talk about potential topics yeah i'm fine with that discuss time we're back into open session results of our just get a session was to extend the contract their current contract for their technical writer for an additional two months and to  amend their contract to extend it for another twelve months after that all right is there anything else from the county i would or not that's everything ok so director was and who they served under what we know who they served under but we don't know who the managing director was i'd like to fill that gap so if we could find someone who is willing to just go back and talk to somebody or to figure out who the managing director was for those missing twelve years between one nine hundred seventy six and one thousand with those all right for employment costs of executive branch positions so anybody hav scales in favor of one or the other that we didn't that we didn't look at but we obviously can't say whether or not that's true because we didn't look at it but we can suggest that it be examined closely anyway that's that's what we want to try to accomplish at this meeting to get the substance of our recommendations corked out so what i have here is a powerpoint i think on i sent it out earlier so you may already have done this powerpoint but it's essentially just some of the tables that i know we've created in the it's also there's nothing new in this but i wanted to go over just a little bit of this so that we have it fresh in our mind once we start talking about activities and so here we have a list of the because we took what we called a value based approach the first five are topics that we decided to look at the last five are ones that we identified but felt that it wasn't our for various reasons one is that we decided not to explicitly look at it that's not to say that we didn't gather information on these things because in many cases we did but it's not the meat of what we were trying to do those are the ones that read those correspond to sections in the report right so i'm just going to go through this really quickly quality and efficiency and in each of these sections we make an assertion that we are trying to gather information about and test so for qualit and a mayor council form of government at least in terms of money spent per capita which was the most common measurement used to look at efficiency and this is controlling for things like population for a lot of other factors there were some that found that there was a relationship but the overall majority and quality of the research would indicate that there is it wouldn't you want to be able to assert that by switching to a county manager form of government that it would lower the amount of money spent per capita here are so hard to deny was this commission feels that it cannot be asserted that a move towards a county manager form of government would result in more efficient provision of basic services another way of saying this is that it can be sorted out or moved to a county manager from a government result in savings in the provision of services to the public it doesn't matter if it's county manager form of government or not there are other things that make up those differen not the form of government or how that matters to get qualified personnel do in colorado forms of government result in better qualified individuals at the chief administering officer level then mayor council governments chief administering officer refers to either the county matter jerk on matters of form of government or and many cases even in a mayor council form of government there is a chief magic officer here in our county we have one of those which is the managing director so even though it is there are different ways in which our person is selective whether it's by the mayor or by the council we have e g the mystery though it may be a subject to isn't really the mayor or is it the managing director that's  hire qualified professionals cause the manager governments have added in aspects of politics into their governments as well these quotes essentially are there to just say we can get qualified management no matter which form of government we're looking at you can get people that have those professional qualifications whether it's from a stronger form of government or economy or you don't need a county manager form of government to have qualified professionals so what i did then was being templates for job descriptions of city managers and i threw a thousand oaks california there because it's possible for so i threw in something else but the point behind this is that the exact specifications for what qualifies somebody as a city manager is quite broad and in many cases meet that criteria we meet that criteria already so essentially switching over to a county manager form of government and using the template based descriptions and qualifications for a common council manager would not change essentially or would not disqualify our current chief administrative officer from being that that message the second thing that i find interesting here is that there is almost always a difference between the job description itself and what is put down in county ordinance so even though for instance grass valley california has that they want somebody with five years experience as a city or county manager preferred leave and that they want somebody with a master's degree or a business a master's degree are commensurate experience and education when it comes down to their county ordinance or what they have for instance in their city charter it doesn't say that it says there shall be at city administrative shall be the chief or mystery of office or the city the council shall appoint the person to police the best qualified on the basis of executive i'm assured of qualifications with specific reference or experience in and knowledge of accepted practice and so on and so forth but it never states that has to be someone with three or five years of experience and condi or his friends essentially they could hire whoever they wanted to hire if they wanted to do it and this isn't a council manager for the government now the reason why this is important is because when it comes down to recommendations do we need to change our charter or even a council manager forms of government they don't specify the template what it is supposed to be three to five years seeking and so i guess i would be cautious of putting verbiage in the charter that's going to excessively tie the hands of somebody that could be extremely qualified but you know you're missing here by six months you know the minimum qualifications you know did you see were going on i absolutely and i think that that explains why we see such very broad and open verbiage when it comes  to county ordinances about who's going to be put into the city or council like that even when they say five years i mean my goodness if you're going to have someone at that level and they have less than five years something's wrong something's really wro so five years is a good threshold i mean at least i don't see it is is you know a barrier you know to to what anybody else is doing i think that they just decided five was the number more of my concern is the educational side and you know it's you  about trying to find average verses media ten years and our actually found a really good academic article that looked at one hundred twenty different municipalities by size the blue chart is the longest tenure the gray is the shortest tenure and in the orange is the media tenure the average tenure for all of them is that is a college that they looked at was around seven years but you can see how that average is heavily swayed by managers who have been there for decades twenty years thirty years right so when you have somebody there has been there for thirty years it pulls the average way up it skews the distribution and it makes an average a poor indicator of what the the real time somebody would be the academic article as well as what my suggestion would be is to look at the median tenure or in other words at what point do half of the city managers leave or go so almost across the board it's around between it's around five years or in other words half of the county managers leave before  five years and half of them leave after five years so on i see that as being a much better indicator of what that center is for how long we could expect a council manager to be here is that very different only provided average even that average is not really an average because the question that they ask is how long have you been in service so it's not a real after he they call it an average but it's not so everywhere that you see a seven  five years for council managers you get it is the professional that we talk to the head if you can or the professional recruitment company right you mentioned five years and out as an average ten year we have here an average emphasized the fact that the ten years the council members is very important election cycle there's a direct correlation to the length of time they stay in election cycles so if there is a more frequent election cycle river yet if there's a big change in council we don't have a lot of changes in our own sovereignty but it's important that it still you know people do get elected every two years and you could be changing great so what this turnover so they do exist and the duration for that but that the productivity that loss is largely absorbed by division heads who have been there and roofs we have from the average length of time that a division head is it's twenty years which is incredible to try frankly that our division heads are there for such a long time it's amazing so i see  insufficient evidence to assert that a change to a county manager for government would reduce turnover costs at the ca although we're not talking about departments but the seattle office well it's difficult to assess for department heads because we don't have information over the place but it comes down to just executive branch structures and then we compared it to napa county only now the county is example of a council manager system of government where the executive salaries and executive costs are actually essentially wages and that's the kind of financial impacts us credit rating reports this is from the actual credit rating report that came out in two thousand and fifteen now the reason why we look at these credit reports is because it the mother body that takes management very very seriously i can't think of another organization that is more systematic and cares more about the associated management o  and they cites very strong financial position for money good management consistent balance operation it's good financial practice insanity and so on and so forth when we called up and asked them do they care about the form of government they said that that's not a calculate that's not something that they explicitly look at when they provide their criteria rather they look at the financial management of the  more to do with county fiscal policy tax base economy and structured long term obligations than its form of government essentially it doesn't matter whether it's c just want to make sure that fiscal policy is maintained bt and that fiscal policy maintain it can occur whether it's a council manager or a strong their data can sit great so there is no substantive reason to accept the assertion that i can't see him out council manager form of government will result in improvements on any of the allies topics that we do we feel comfortable with  example of this is in qualified personnel the reason why this is even coming up is because people don't feel that management school that's i mean that's the bottom line reason why this is coming up for whatever reason that is now that doesn't mean that we can't provide a recommendation that says ok we want to be sure that we're getting qualified professionals in there and we can do that so this shows us kind of a special because we talk how there is in the country the different ways in which you can do it a different way so right now we have a strong marriage centrally the mayor is elected at large and the mayor alternately has the power to hire and fire his departments that's a strong america we could move toward and now the opposite of that is a county manager form of government where the county council is the one who chooses all executive positions we have kind of in between there as well so moving up from the strong there are modified requirements essentially is in the charter we would put more strict qualifications for what the sheep industry officer is so essentially what it would look like from our county is we'd make the now let's remember that even though those are the five things that we looked at there are still bees other speaks that will influence somebody decision as to why they would want a council a county manager over a strong political influence on officials accountability for exact a personality the belief that the count the a four year is too long of a time for accountability representative personnel to the county so our week is the mare representative of the views points and everything of the entire population checks and balances was something that was mentioned quite a lot that we want to have some system of checks and balances and due process which is a last one so those are other reasons why people say they want to switch between the two now we've gathered some evidence on these other things as well  what do we want to recommend options that are you know they will look at it and we can look at them as citizen but is it a recommendation of this is it appropriate for this board to make recommendations on the politics of council versus mayor in his everybody playing nicely in the sandbox that's not i don't think that's what i did i think instead of making recommending yeah i see kind of a third option where instead of making a recommendation there you have these topics that we looked at specifically with because of our view of our own charter is that our economic efficiency base these other ones are if all the topics we looked at the scales still remain balanced then it would put more emphasis on the ones that we didn't look at so our recommendation could essentially be did we feel that these are better reasons to make this change than the reasons that we looked at yeah and and downs and so you know you we suggest focusing on those and that's it we make no specific recommendation about them yeah but that's important you know in the end if it if it gets a lot of media attention my county gets engaged then that could be you know hopefully they decided for good reasons and then those would be the good case since they're better than the economic ones anyway this if specially if they're going to assume that the savings are that would be automatic like so many seem to assume because that's what's going to say sure that will get everybody's attention it's looking at those types of variables but i would hope too that by saying that these we think are the ones that may or may not decided we we don't know we'd look at it but the ones that we looked at we don't feel like those any of those issues should be the deciding issue so you know it would be hopefully the other commission would take that recommendation and put more emphasis in their research on those other issues because those are the ones and more are if there is a value within my county that's going to decide this it's more likely to be over here than it is things that we  paul what do you think the recommendation would be i think that's a fine recommendation i think that's fine recommendation  short couple sentences and i think that's good enough we don't want to go too deep into it ok i think if there is if there is a good recommend it would be more and finding measurable ways to track our economy efficiency excellent so that we can either determine know the goal of of accessibility i think would be for you know any member of the public to be able to look at the benchmarks that my county is has  recommendation would then be to make explicit connections between performance measurements and the client service department the one thing i wanted to point out at least within discussions of the special committee some of those discussions similar to that have hinged on has the county actually produced reports it is mandated to produce by the county county charter and those reports have not surfaced so the family it's difficult to be able to look at you know whether a project sensible if they don't exist so that's a discussion that's been taking place with a special committee some level so for example planning planning required to produce a new one there is no as so far there has been no no report that it's been excellent an honest answer that's why i think like a policy solution ors you know that comes from telcel that says the department website has to show the reports on the home page and it has to you know show up reports  do i think it comes down to what those reports are i mean what i can see happening is the department making a report and then people saying well that's not what i wanted to see just like how we make performance measures and that people mayor from the public the council can direct the budget and research department to do that because why they have all the information to do the monetary you know the physical decisions and they usually collect the most information about what is happening satisfaction with something about the way or the executive branch i think it would be wise for us this is often as we can to find solutions that are policy based solutions that can be exact that can be the council level rather than executive solutions that the mayor would have to implement so i think you know whatever whatever we do it's the act i like the idea of you know charter amendments and  think we can suggest that's based soley on economy and efficiency measure affronts indicators make existing performance measures more accessible and user friendly make explicit connections between performance measuring county plants so that we know that there is action between what they plan to do and what they're being measure any recommendations here that's another possible recommendation i have a third recommendation counsel involvement in setting job description so instead of the council actually saying yes or no they have some say in who the candidate is from the beginning as opposed to the  because people think that we don't have qualified people in there right now so that's the reason why a way of overcoming that is by giving the council more say as to who those people are going to be now i looked into this a little bit it's the most common way in which most legislative bodies show disapproval for appointments is through censure so those are the most common ways and most spite of all parliamentary systems that a legislative body would say i don't like the way that you're doing things so we pass a motion in our legislative body  neighborhood your neighborhood everybody and then you go before the senate and they look at all the work history to look for controversy your enemies are going to look for controversy and you can highlight that during your confirmation hearing committees on the council you know have a nexus you know with that position and so i mean it works at the federal level of the say you know the way the state government works in arizona and of planted by the governor there to work to be the state real development director i was interviewed by just hartman interested in hiring me and you know up to i happen to know one of the chief of staff they worked with him when i was with the feds but then the other chief of staff had to also concur so you look at the same thing it's a vetting process you know and when you're in politics that's everything it's your pedigree honestly what you've done how credible you are and it's important that you understand who you know what the priorities for the elected official are so it's not to denigrate that process i think it the reason they go to the congress and everything else because they're and they want to know you know since sept first and is in that district does that person have that local support and that's the essence of that so i think that kind of which they already do don't you member that was in the discussion is still in the county council at the moment decided not to include council involvement in the appointment of managing director financial director finance was the other one it was another one there or there's three or four of them so they decided they sided not to and the reasoning behind not doing that was because they felt that those individuals were the key individuals that do that in force policies on behalf of the mayor and it was very important that they had good working relationships and essential if the council is essentially picking and choosing who those people are you're not going to have that working relationship between the mayor and those individuals which can then lead to poor performance and the in the that was the argument that they made in two thousand and twelve and not doing exactly that now their minds may have changed since then which is the thing that yes maybe we we do need to have that or not but do we want to recommend  whether how much recruitment as it keeps it's going to play a role and so it was one of the recommendations that i had for the next topic which may overlap in some ways is to look at the pay schedules for some of you know these these department heads so that their reward for a long ten years or you know they or you know it it's not it's not just said is this job pa productivity at that level a curse as a result of that rapid dismissal and then quick fire of all the you how you do not go how do you get the inevitable turnover at the mer level while retaining good department has that's what we want to write we want to see good department heads stay in their departments yeah even if the merit changes so you you how do we do that you would have to have them not i mean if you have a allocated to keeping the previous department head on for a period of say two months for training purposes or training purposes that you know so it and that could be there could be a judgment call to it is but having those funds available civil servant and you know and have to turn over happens in our government every four years and when you present gets elected every eight years it happens in state capitals too and it's a time honored you know process that if you win your piece went to it that's the way it is and you are people lining up for these things and honestly to protect apartment man just really it's kind of like it's counter productive but when we talk about this is what a strong mayor is you're absolutely right you know we were looking at a comparison between on a spot of spectrum to extremes and making recommendations well maybe if you want more of this result you could look at doing the form of government you can say there's no real difference form of government that we have strong here and i think the key point here is that they have they're having these  the department and i see arguments on both sides of our recommendations would be then towards ways in which the county council can prod them those department heads regardless of who they are and that leads us back to censure and well i think the confidence i think that it is should the county council should have a say you know i don't think this should be the final say gas to be you know that you really either you or you politics so well that you have all the support combined with you're so good at what you do that some people will overlook you know record it's got the council saying we do not support this candidate and executive leadership still puts it through they know why yeah you know through either media exposure or whatever of the mayor really which is related to this and i haven't read the continent of commerce on proposal but one of the issues might be the timing if you it's easy if you have a department head that's going to come in the middle of a term but if you have amir that gets elected he or she then gets to a point all of these directors with the council being able to do some vetting and you're concerned about the costs of turnover which councils going to do that are put in place tools that allow people to make more informed decisions about the the current status of now county so if the mayor could appoint anybody wants but if you point somebody is not qualified and a lot of them you know both a salary commission and yes to go to this commission to you know if you're charged with efficiency and cost savings in all that where he was looking it is the question is are our council members full time members or are they consider have time members if they're considered have time members this would be a salary commission question is if they were full time at their half time salary they'd be making more let's yeah let's just go with this topic can the word at this point we're just going to consider potential topics for an extra four twenty sixteen twenty seven to report  like to identify some specific topics worthy of investigation as it's coming here and we would like it if you have a recommendation on a good process as we can follow in order to  a continuing stream of good ideas for subject matter subject matter exactly did not mean it doesn't need to explain something yeah call in and say i see this is a gross dereliction use of county funds i'd appreciate it if you'd spent some time looking at x whatever happens is there a mechanism for because there's not a hotline well there and i guess what i'm looking towards is something that would still go in the objectivity of the areas keep the independence of the two entities yet yet still share some information to say to when you get people to call you and say i'll actually get this if you think it's a subject matter that might be valuable for us to say we'll take your recommendation and and we would also suggest if you wanted to there's your father six yeah who because if you go to i don't know what the process is that you can go to the council meeting yeah and there is an issue that's financed by the public in the current process yet who is responding to those things ok that for next month maybe if we each come with a couple of topics that we can think of individual ian will just go through what everybody else is thinking is also a good way of getting started on their putting together a list to go there and we'll see what sticks well glance at it every  for forty rea which i like our next topic and become sharing it and so are do we feel comfortable in a month's time and we have another meeting to go already got which will have next month to the show this next year i'm sure with your question so the next meeting of so we identify two bodies that we want to talk to some of the special committee do we want to do i mean i think i feel that providing a presentation i want to their meetings is the optimal with sharing our recommendations with them and we can even stated as we want their feedback on what our recommendations are because we're still which i see that to be appropriate i guess that's the question is are you going to be sharing recommendations it sounds like you want to do before your report is finalized which we're going to push back potentially for a while how long it takes to finalize your report or do you want to just finalize it and then and cases you know otherwise i mean i'm concerned about you opening it up after you've done all this work and then you're going to then your meetings like two weeks apart so the next meeting you kind of have as much as you can done and drafted and then you know if you need any more additional tweaks because you haven't don't have recommendations finalized on paper then you talk about it and then you just finish it and you know we need all these little things that still need to put in be put in after you've got to the point where you have the that entire body those things can be work done now between the next in the near month as well so you can get as close to finished as possible ok by next by next month ok you're very good at that