It arrived on Monday’s agenda as a late addition to restore the arrangement of the Auburn City Council to what it had been before 2014 — five standing subcommittees, each with a single chair at its head.

Adding to each plan at least one general study session month, one less than the present system.

After nearly two hours of arguments and counter arguments, and numerous motions that came up and went down, however, the council reached a different destination.

That is, it agreed to consider a hybrid system, favoring a study session with council members sharing the role of chairman on different occasions based on their areas of expertise, at the suggestion of City Attorney Dan Heid.

To do the spade work, the council appointed an ad hoc committee to review the council structure, with Councilman Rich Wagner as its chair, councilmen Claude DaCorsi and John Holman as members, and Heid there to offer his advice.

Opponents of the evening’s original motion, Holman, DaCorsi and Bob Baggett, said it wasn’t ready, and moreover, the subject was fitter for discussion at a study session than for the agenda of the full council.

And seeing that proponents had already attached committee chair assignments to the motion without bringing others into that discussion, Holman raised concerns about the appearance of back-room dealings.

“It’s not ready for prime time,” Holman declared time and again.

“I think the reason we are working so hard on this … is that we want more information,” said Deputy Mayor and committee chair Largo Wales, along with Bill Peloza, Yolanda Trout-Manuel and Rich Wagner a proponent of returning to the former system. “But I am willing to vote this (original motion) down to get more time.”

Before 2014, council members met twice a month in three-member subcommittees like public works, finance and municipal services to talk about proposed legislation reflecting the various silos of City services and listen to City staff present in-depth reports.

Two years ago, however, moved by the possibility of having all council members in one room at the same time, among other things, council members switched to twice-a-month study sessions.

But recently, responding to critiques of the study session format, including the lack of opportunities for council members to chair the meetings – that is exclusively the role of the deputy mayor today – they began to mull DaCorsi’s suggestion of a study session-subcommittee hybrid that would incorporate perhaps a once-a-month study session with a refreshed committee system.

Among the fine points city leaders talked about in recent weeks were a new health and human services committee and an economic development committee, a revival of the municipal services committee, and combining the old committees of community development and public works.

One of the major shortcomings of the study session format, Wagner said, is that the meetings don’t drill down to the same level of detail as the standing committees once did. And that the promise of having everybody in one room at the same time has not panned out the way he had hoped. Wagner said he hoped to change rules and procedures so individual interests and abilities trump seniority when the time comes to doling out committee chairmanships.

Holman, the main firebrand of the change two years ago, never wavered in his opposition to the standing subcommittee system, which he said resulted in incomplete information to those who weren’t on a given three-member committee.

Holman’s biggest beef was that the three council members who served on each committee couldn’t talk to one another about City business outside of the meetings without the danger of falling afoul of the Open Public Meetings Act.

Holman added that the proposed change would have a terrible effect on staff, who, until 2014, had to invest a great deal of precious time preparing for those subcommittee meetings, which took them away from the work the City had actually hired them to do.

Councilman Bill Peloza recently explained why he is no friend of the study-session format.

“We have a preponderance of support going to this type of format. And as far as the legality of committees talking to each other, I did the committee format for eight years, and we didn’t have any legal problems at all. Not one, not one in those eight years,” Peloza said.

Claude DaCorsi called the idea of returning to standing committees that meet twice a month “overkill.”

Yolanda Trout-Manuel supports returning to the standing committee system.