Anyone keen to know where things are with the planning process for Les Gove Park, how Auburn spends its tax dollars, what it is doing about its streets or a myriad of other matters may today sit in on one of the twice-monthly City Council subcommittee meetings.
There they’ll 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 years, this has been the order of things at City Hall, the way ordinances and resolutions have made their way to the full council.
But now this long-established way of doing business appears to be on the way out.
To improve how it operates, the City Council is talking about dropping the subcommittee format in favor of general study sessions by the end of this year.
The upshot is that by January, all seven councilmembers would be present at study sessions, hearing what they would have heard in the subcommittees, except that all of them would hear it at the same time.
On Monday afternoon, councilmembers met in a special session at City Hall to pore over sections of the City Code that provide for subcommittees and then make the necessary deletions and additions to facilitate this change.
The special meeting was sparsely attended, but it was the absence of one person in particular that drew the most comments. Former councilmember Virginia Haugen, who has vociferously criticized the potential change in the belief that it would lead to less transparency, was not there.
Mayor Nancy Backus explained why the City Council is considering this change.
“It’s allowing for more transparency, not letting things slip. So council can all talk about it at the same time, and everybody hears the same thing. Anybody who has sat in on those committees knows that one committee will say one thing, and another say something completely different, and staff members are caught in the middle, trying to figure out which direction to go in,” Backus said.
Another 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.
“Going to the study session format allows three council members to talk about something without violating the Open Public Meetings Act,” Backus said.
