City opts for common study sessions instead of separate committee meetings

Published 1:17 pm Wednesday, November 5, 2014

If you want to know where things are at with the planning process for Les Gove Park, how Auburn spends its dollars, what it is doing about its streets or a myriad of other matters, up to now all you’ve had to do was sit in on one of the twice-monthly City Council subcommittee meetings.

There you’d hear small groupings of Auburn’s elected leaders – three councilmembers and often the mayor – hash out issues with City staff, weeks or even months in advance of any Council vote.

For more than 40 years, such has been the order of things at City Hall, the way ordinances and resolutions have made their way to the full council.

But this long-established way of doing business is officially on the way out.

To improve how it operates, the City Council on Monday dropped the subcommittee format in favor of general study sessions. The upshot is that by January, all seven councilmembers will be present at study sessions, hearing what they would have heard in the subcommittees, except that all of them will hear it at the same time.

Former Councilmember Virginia Haugen, who had criticized this change in the belief that it would create less transparency, now appears to be willing to give it a try.

“Yes, I am against getting rid of the committee system, but if we have a plan that will give us absolute transparency, if we can talk about issues in a fair and democratic way, and if we can make decisions that make this community a better place to live, then I will accept what this council decides to do,” Haugen said before the unanimous vote.

Deputy Mayor Rich Wagner later explained the City Council’s reasoning.

“The City Council at its retreat last April discussed the efficiency, and transparency and quality of the decisions that come out of the committee system, which has been in place in the City for about 40 years, submitted by former Council member Bud Larson. For that time it was a great way to do business, and we have tried to carry into the study sessions the best parts of the committee system while bringing forward new things like televising the sessions. We now have improvements in efficiencies for staff, so they’ll only have to make presentations to one group instead of two or three. And it will give all of the council members the opportunity to hear the same thing at the same time, and that will likely improve the quality of our decisions,” Wagner said.

“All of us on this dais are going to hear the same staff report,” said Councilmember Bill Peloza. “There’s not going to be one committee where you hear one thing and then staff, they’re tired of talking about it and they go to another committee and it may be skewed a little bit. But that I think is normal. This change has a huge potential for reduced costs for the taxpayer once we get this thing all ironed out.”

One consideration is the state’s Open Public Meetings Act. Today, if two councilmembers serve on the same subcommittee, they cannot legally talk to each other about the issues outside of the meetings.

By going to the study session format, three council members can talk about an issue without violating the Open Public Meetings Act.