So to order, I am present. Who else is present? Council Member Siggins-Zurek, also present. Wonderful.
Thank you for being present. You're present. I'm present, but I'm not. It's Dr. Conchmouth,
District 1. Present? Present. Yes. Can you present? I'm here. She's here.
Also, where I'm sure if they are present or not, but that's fine.
All right, well, I have wondered if you're wondering about the commentaries of why we have to also say
that we're physically good. Anyway, but so today, too. I am you suck and I am here. And hopefully at
some point we'll be joined by a counselor rather than Dave Bravo.
We have two agenda points. The thing that we planned to talk about, and thank you all for being here
for this purpose, is we wanted to talk about the administrative needs of the council, particularly post-May
7th or whenever you become pumpkins. So thinking about that question,
And that overlaps with the questions that our clerks sent around the wonderful sort of statement of
processes, which is something I think we can think about and talk about, thinking about the overlap
with the clerk's office. And then as we have time, we've finally got signed the documentation for Larry Allen,
We're just waiting for the mayor needs to sign a conflict of interest form. So that's the last thing
I have a call with her after this meeting so hopefully we can get that finalized and I suppose that
that means they'll be sort of starting tomorrow issue or something like that, which is great.
And so we should, what I'd like to talk about if we have time is to think about, I think we have a good
sense of the, you know, keep council running elements of that job and the framework of the, you know,
15 to 20 hours a week. And we talk about the budget help and all of those things. But I think if we
have time, it would be really nice for us also to think about some things that we'd like to, particularly
because we got the very, very
himself is to think of some things that we might charge this position with. And so thinking about, for
example, whether it would be worth
as a deliverable saying that we'd like some input on how to improve the processes for this position
for the person who fills it in and thinking about some handover documentation or things of that nature.
So I'm seeing that as a thought. So when we have time, we can, we can maybe just start a process of
brainstorming that we can bring to the broader council over the next few days. And then we say,
so with that, let's go to, or any other things you'd like to talk about while we're here.
Well, I'll just add to that a little bit, because it might also be helpful, especially since Larry has
a lot of experience doing budget, it might be helpful for him to work on some materials that might help
us comprehend and process the budget and the sort of amount of expenses that will be coming up shortly.
Any other things that we'd like to add to the agenda other than those two items?
So you're talking about the council attorney position in terms of the workspace, and then your administrative
duties. Yes, but other way around. Yeah, administrative duties, particularly with the pumpkinizing that's
in the future. And then vis-a-vis also clerk. So how are we taking care of administration? Can you talk
about the attorney first, then the administration, because that will actually direct some things that
we can talk about from the clerk's perspective.
I have no objection to that. Any objections to that? No? Okay, so let's do that then. So yeah, so my
prompt really is this, is that if insofar as we have 20 hours a week of attorney support and we've continued
to retain, as we talked about last week, the external counsel as well. That's 15 hours.
If it's going to be 15 to 20 so 15 is like the base time that he can do up to 20 hours triggers anything
so yeah so so we have a little bit a little bit extra which is which is also part of me thinking about
this which is, you know, I think that there will be weeks where the things you know.
prep for meetings, particularly if we have a thing that would require a lot of legal research or many
counsel questions, or if we have new legislation. I know that many of us are thinking about different
things that we're just waiting to have a lawyer to be able to introduce. I can imagine there'll be weeks
where that time gets eaten up fairly quickly. Or we have long meetings and that time gets eaten up.
But in the assumption that there's some excess time,
what would you want this person to do? Because part of the agreement is that we basically are just paying
him flat, like he's gonna be mindful of his time and reporting his time, et cetera, but you know, there's
like, he's gonna do 15 hours a week, so, and up to 12. So what do we want to use that time for if there's
additional things that we might need to use the role of? Well, I would like to ask,
I'm sorry, can you repeat that? Whether the clerk's office will continue to put together the council
patents with also our council president doing a lot of that work. Will that process continue or would
the clerk's office need to divest itself of that work?
we're going to end up talking about everything kind of in a big jumble. It's okay. I think part of the
concern that I had moving into this space was looking at what your plan was for your office structure
overall, because that does dictate what the clerk's office actually does and how compensation will be
shifted to the clerk's office and or what responsibilities going forward.
what we've already seen over the last few months is a bit of creep in terms of what things were handling.
And this is also after having agreed with your previous staff members that we would help them out while
they were in a transition period. So the answer is it depends in large part on kind of what you guys
want to do moving forward. And I feel like a terrible jerk in saying it in those ways, but
for the reason that we were very careful to just write an April guide for the end of your pumpkin period.
I'm so sorry, you guys. I know, it's really just what it is. It's fine. It's fine. They seem to remember.
It's terrible. I'm gonna make you like, well, put on your costumes before you go. Anyway, so I think
that's one of the things. And honestly, the work that you will have to do goes far beyond the similar
in the package.
So that's the other question, which is, you have a whole host of administrative duties that are traditionally
handled by your staff. Who's going to do that? And if you don't have a plan for that, because that's
time alone, as far as we can piece together, based on previous staff members who've done that work,
that's over 80 hours worth of work. So what do you want to work on?
No, for a week. For averaging out the times that we spend on busy times, for example, Jack Hopkins,
right, at Hopkins season, except a lot of times during recess where you're not spending, obviously,
any time on packets. So it's taking up, on average, throughout the year, you might, if you're spending,
you know, 40 hours total on Jack Hopkins, because, you know, for eight weeks, you're spending five hours
with them. Honestly, it's more, I don't even really work down, but it's,
Significant and it's on the very low edge of things. I've had to stay no more than like four hours.
So most of them are like 15 minutes just because it's an error on the outside. You broke it down for
reading, you broke it down through different categories. So looking at questions of communications,
finances, budget, caps, memorandum, minutes, training, onboarding, packet materials, which is a good
chunk of time, meetings for during reading.
You do our notes and memorandum. For caps. For caps. Oh, for caps. Okay. Research, legislative work,
attorney's support, committees, constituent meetings, accessibility. So all of those things come up.
Constituent meetings? So can we talk about- We do a lot of your setup, but putting it on the website
is some of that other stuff that has to be checked.
And again, not all council members and both the same level of work at the end of the year. I'm not going
to be disrespectful when I say that. No, absolutely. So that we sort of structure that, because the
impact of it, understood, but then it was like, so now the question is sort of sorting, you know,
sorting these things. And I think that there's two questions. There's a horizon question, which is,
what are the things that make sense for the clerks to do just anyways? And there's an overlapping question
of, does that have implications for pay and salary? That's a different conversation. But we're actually
an important one. But at the first basis, the
You know, there's the horizon question. So where are we trying to shift, which I think you also said
already, which is what are some of the things that we imagine our office being? But then there's also
then the questions that, okay, there are things like you talk about, like, okay, like posting for exigently
maybe or something like that for, you know, which can be at this type of task or at this type of task.
And so we could also think about certain controls around some of those things. So would it be useful
maybe to go over
Like, so I go over the list, like in a, like, sort of like systematic, like go over it one by one and
talk about each of these things. Like how, what's the best way of. Well, I think there's, the timeline
is important, right? So there's the immediate current situation that we're in. Yeah. And I mean, we,
as in all of, you know, council member, and I think that the next is May 1st comes, May 8th comes, then what?
That's timeline two. And then timeline three is what I think you're calling horizon, which is what actually
makes sense. And we have, I mean, I know I have lots of thoughts on what makes sense, because having
seen it in some institutional knowledge that's carried over for, I've been here now going from seven
years in November. So that's three councils, two administrations, many council staff. So I think that
there's lots of,
solutions and remedies that we could suggest because we're kind of the content experts on the preparation
and record keeping, retention schedule, all of those things that are statutory good, not the content
experts on like flexways or whatever it means. So that's why I break it up into the three distinct timelines
and then what that looks like.
venture to add that we're actually talking about, not three, maybe four, because the real dynamic is
we're going to be figuring on now, we're going to get May 7th, we're going to lose video and all staff
support. What is the plan for May 7th through council recess, through what, July 22nd? Because realistically,
you know, it's going to be completely solved and cured, in a general sense, not like your disease.
Or a cousin. Or a cousin. You know, you're not me too. But you are my cousin. So that's where I'm kind
of looking at and saying, hey, what is the plan moving forward? But again, I know I signed a broken
record. I don't want to get into the space where we continue to do this work. And it becomes expected,
especially looking at the way that we're seeing some of the downgrading and processors in our own spaces
and trying to keep everything working.
absolutely kind of. I want to make council. Did I say it? I want to make council great again. For example,
we have had city staff members already reaching out to us because they rightfully should not be reaching
out to even Aria who is
council staff versus a fellow, you know what I mean? Like there's clear distinctions that like right
now things are getting missed. And we're doing, it's working, but I think that the city staff is still
confused right for this time. I think when the fall rolls back around and we'll have the capacity to
do like the packets and everything, we were compiling them ahead of time. So I think it's kind of just
the short term that really needs to be addressed because once that
comes back around, I think a lot of the burdens being put on the clerk's office can sort of come back
to us, especially if there's gonna be two fellows still. Right. And then in addition, by then we should
have, I mean, at least one attorney for that, right? And I think that's great, but if they have a part-time
staffer who's their attorney, the supervision, putting things on, proving any timesheets or write-ups
that you need for staffing, those are things that you guys can't review. Yeah. And who's gonna do it
because it really shouldn't
Well, I can't. It's not my fault. But having a constant person and do all of that for an extended period
of time does not seem sustainable, plus you tend to lose muscle memory. Yeah. Yeah. Time goes on for
that sort of thing. OK. But then, so back to your initial list. If we were to put these into buckets,
and then I'd love to hear what you all think about the things that are you putting back. I'll be back
in the fall. Ari is the only one who's not back. Evan is also available over the summer.
In theory, yeah. In theory, and Michael is, right? Yeah, Michael's definitely a machine coming back.
I am not planning on being here physically, but we'll see. Right, TBD? TBD. Okay. Study abroad got canceled.
Oh, I'm sorry. I was going to Brazil. Oh, sorry. Got canceled on four months after this. Would you like
us to go on your set? Okay, so of the list that you brought up,
where do you sort of view each of these things? Both we have the sort of timeline horizon, but then
all the timeline, the few stages, but then there's also just the like type of functions, right? Because
things like Jeff Hopkins, one, it's a slightly improved process now. A lot of the time socket of that
has been taken away by digitizing some of the application elements and things like that. Courtney is
also doing more than, I don't know,
than what had been done in the past. But I'm interested in where would you put them in categories? There's
a very big difference between constituent meetings. That's not mission critical whether a constituent
meeting gets posted on the website versus that we make the Jack Hopkins process work and people get
their money. It's like they're two different things.
They are broken down. I would be happy to share some of the breakdown with you, which I think is more
helpful than me, if I'm looking through the work we did. But I guess I'm still coming back to the question
of if you have your attorney who's doing your 15 hours a week, and that's getting broken down where
every council member correct me or do whatever you want to do.
If every council member gets an hour with the attorney to go through their concerns or legal questions
and everything else, and the rest is just dedicated legal work, all that other stuff still has to be
done. Are you moving to a space where you want the first office to take over that role of being the
super chief staff slash administrator or whatever you want to call it in character?
remaining if it isn't really jam, council administrator, deputy clerk of council administration, this
smells better in the evening stuff than I am hoping she jumps in under the moment. I like the ones that
you came up with. Okay. Deputy clerk of council administration. That's good to me. But if that's something
that he wants to, that's cool. We can start actually
planning for our default position tends to be, what are we doing in 50 years in the office? So building
for that, so we can have replicable processes as an office makes sense to me. But if you're really aiming
toward rebuilding your current structure, in that case, I would say, we're going to back away and then
it's all working out. Does that make that a lot longer than it needs to be from the meeting time?
But I mean, I think the problem is that it seems to me the understanding among majority council members
was once we get an apparent hire, that person is going to look at the structure of the office and the
work done and have input into what happened. So it's impossible, even though we won't need the help,
at least through the end of the summer. I don't think the three of us committee members can permit
I think that's a great point. Let's put an action on the table and see and react to it. One way that
we can address this is that we can hire, for example, if Michael, I'm talking to Michael later,
this week about this question of being available in summer, so we could hire Michael in Ari's position
after Ari goes off to become a lawyer, right? Is that the thoughts on, and giving Michael all this stuff
to do, right? Is that, reactions to that? Is he graduating? No, he's just here all summer. Oh, just
giving it to him for the summer.
Is he available for full-time? Definitely full-time. Do we know who's available for full-time? No. Okay.
He said he was available for more than what the current fellowship is. We're going to elaborate more
on that. I think it would have to be 29 hours, right? Because otherwise it becomes a different job.
I think there are like 14. I'm 29 hours. Because after acting 29, you have to get the legal health insurance.
Yeah. I don't have that.
So why is that a barrier when we have money in our budget? Yeah, and so that's what I'm asking. Is that
the best solution? If we need a full-time person, let's get a full-time person. So that's the question
on the table, right? So one reaction, yes. You have more options than just Michael. That would be great.
I'm not trying to come through on him. But you also have a past researcher who just passed the bar.
and got their work visa so they could actually work with a council. I think I'm meeting with Kristen
on a Friday so I can talk to her. So you have other options. And I think that's a good sort of discussion
about your evening council prep and stuff like that on Wednesdays. I would prioritize that.
not just in the summer, but into the fall. If you're trying to prioritize where you have work and where
you don't, you can do it personally, but for me, I hire Mary, I hire Christine, I have Michael do the
meetings, and we talk to the clerk staff about filming gaps that you have there. That's what I would
do, but I am one person in front of the clerk's office, and I know you guys have your other considerations.
That seems reasonable to me. I'll tell you my other consideration, and then, I mean, I'm being open here,
on my theory of change, which is, and I've said it from the beginning, which is, and I think Isabel
and I have both said something along these lines that in the long run, it is better. Let me say it this
way. It is better for the clerk to be more integrated into the things that council best
I think it is. And I think that there are a lot of positive institutional outcomes to the clerks being
allowed, being able, being powered to do many of the things that we are discussing. I think that's one
of the things. And I think that there are a plethora of institutional benefits to that.
One of which is that, just being frank, I think that it's a vehicle through which you could increase,
you could arguably, justifiably, however else you want to say it, increase clerk pay, particularly of
these types of clerks.
of the chief ones while in possibly saving money. I actually think that there's a model in which you
can shift some of these costs that we currently put on overtime, that we currently put on tech staff,
that we end up bloating in the council budget that would perhaps make more sense passing to a clerk.
It then also gives us more flexibility in terms of how we
Use council and how we organize the council staff and what I mean by that not flexibility actually latitude,
because I think that at the moment and all the conversations we're having about well we're going to
hire an attorney and that person can decide, we actually don't have a lot of degrees of freedom. If,
if already, you know,
80% of their job is spoken for and you make packets and you do this and you show up to meetings,
you know, and I'm maybe over-generalizing the amount, but you see what I'm saying in terms of, you know,
we don't give a person a lot of breathing room. And I think that that's also the learning curve for
eligible people to be hired, which makes the job just really, really difficult. And so just to me, it
makes a lot of sense to devolve a lot of that to the clerk.
There's a side of me which says that I'd really like to use the silver lining of this moment to see
like, what does it look like for more things go to the clerk and secure the reports back on, okay, well,
yeah, this did result in us working more, this, you know, this stretches here and here and here are
the pain points. And then, right, so that we actually start seeing, I don't know how, when else we'll
be able to do that. So that's, I'm thinking out loud here, but just thinking about, you know,
just how this all worked. I also will note that I think that, you know, there's been, it was just really
unfortunate timing, right, when we lost our staff, because then you guys immediately went on break,
and then, you know, there's been bereavement, another of these, like there's just been like, you know,
totally unfortunate timing. However, I will note that the interface between clerk and our wonderful
staff, I think has been a really, really strong, and I think a really positive point.
correct me if you feel otherwise in front of them, please. The better that we knew how those processes
are working, like now, like we have somebody comes in the universe, we're like, wait, who's doing this?
And, you know, Oh, are you here? I didn't know you're here. Like, you know, like those types of things.
But I just think that that interface also feels a lot more natural than the interface of like counsel attorney,
I don't know, this is a lot more of a natural way to organize this side of the office than I think that
we have otherwise. So again, just thinking out loud about sort of a lot of the benefits here. Yeah,
I mean, I agree. I think that a lot of the administrative tasks, if we could move those to Clark's office
and providing sufficient staffing for that office to do that,
I think it makes sense. I think we would have to think about our fellows who are fellows for the council,
not for the clerk, and maybe should gain more experience in legislation since we're a legislative branch.
Yeah, that's a good point. And so take some of the administrative work maybe off of them. Maybe the
ideal fellow experience isn't learning how to
I actually will say like the title of my position is legislative policy research fellow right I feel
like you know candidly right I
I've done a little bit of that. I had to look up what a river was to determine whether the... Yes, exactly.
I just said it was any continuously flowing body on water. But yes, so I've done things here and there.
We can talk about this after this.
Enough of that, I think, in my position. So I think that was actually something I was going to talk
about before the end of the semester about the fall. But since that's being brought up now, I think
that is something that I'd like to use more of the bulk of my time on. I 100% agree. I would like to
use more of my time to write legislation. We want to use more of our time to maintain the records in
a proper way.
you know, future courts aren't inheriting boxes of rights, right? So I have a question for you.
And honestly, except from the fiscal committee, because we were talking about salaries around the state,
and I started looking at stuff today, I was looking at it there. And one of the things that they have
is they have the nine council in their council budget, they've got the nine council members, they have
a chief of staff,
Formerly something something like their legislative whatever I don't remember it, but then they have
three legislative phases. I talked to Susan up there. You talked to Susan? I think so. Yeah, she's amazing.
But which is similar to an idea that I think Councilmember Boland had at one point and somebody else
about dividing the work of three interns and putting it in an intern position.
And that way each council member has an intern that they can go to and say blah, blah, blah. And like
internship programs and fellows, and wondering whether or not they're actually differentiated in terms
of their workload, because you're not really supposed to use them for work of a regular staff person.
So to the question of legislative research, I mean, actually,
meeting with the students who are working for the city, whether they're getting credit, but getting
them the skills, the things they need to move forward in their education career, I think is enormously
important. But I also think that you don't want all these, I mean, this is such a reactive environment
because it's been like, we're like shoestring all the time, and so as a consequence, it's like
Hey, look at what a river is, is like, like, like, like you want, you want there to be a real long-term.
I found power of the benefit of actually having a supervisory position in place where somebody has function,
or has their ministry, or who's actually tracking their time appropriately and saying, Hey,
council member, you've already gotten your five hours of work out of this intern. So you're going to
need to have to wait. Yeah. The other thing, I mean, the other thing that I think a lot of us have were,
you know, the,
There's a time when our current, when our prior council attorney sent us all an email being like,
I can't do, I can't remember what it was, ABC, because I'm working on X, Y, and Z. And I think most
of us were like, oh, like unaware of what the whole, what the list was of X, Y, and Z. I was like,
even me, I'm like, okay, half of these things I've never heard about.
no idea why you're working on them. Like, I don't know the genesis of them, don't know what the output
of them is going to be, no idea what the timeline is. And so again, like it shows that, you know,
so much of, so we have a lot, a lot that we can do to improve the experience for everybody. And importantly,
for council members, right? I mean, as much as, you know, I've been thinking an awful lot about,
you know, about as much as,
Like as much as it's been, I think for most people, they don't realize that all the stuff that you all
are doing in the background, which is amazing. I think that's how it should be. Like in many ways, like,
like it's good for things that run so smoothly that people don't even realize. But it's like the things
that are making, like the reason why we're still talking about Hopewell.
by and large is because council members have been inhibited to do our own jobs. We're not even getting
answers to questions, which means that every meeting goes, you know what I'm saying? When it takes a
really long time to get that support, and I think that we saw that in the past, we just didn't realize
it as much. I think that the underlying structure is becoming a lot clearer around everyone.
So again, to your point about transitioning what these positions look like, I think that the answer
lies very heavily on what does more support from clerks look like. But I recognize that there's a two-prong
element to that that I think makes the conversation more difficult. One is the question that I already
put on the table, which is compensation.
What makes that challenging, though, is that there's also things that are in code that belong to the
clerk that we've taken as a counsel on as ourselves. So those, to me, exist in an interesting tension
where it's like,
local codes, local code primarily. So there's some very explicit things in Title II. I think there's
some arguments going to be made about state code, which is that there's implicit statements about what's
expected that the court would do. But I'm just saying there's things that are in our code. And so there's
this question of what's devolution versus what's increased role
But regardless, the baseline is current. So even if we're devolving all this stuff back to you, one
assumes that your pay is set currently based on your current workload. And so, you know, so as the,
and we have this weird dynamic where
the elected clerk gets to set the salaries for clerk staff, but council has to approve it. So that's
also a conversation that I think we need to figure out a way to have with our colleagues to figure out
really to get some, if we're doing some devolution, passing more things onto the clerk, I think we wanna
have a clear sense of what are those things that it's not this ad hoc arrangement, but it's really like
no clerks do packets or whatever,
of those things that are on the list. Like these are the things that belong to the clerk. And workflows
between the council staff and clerk staff. Yes, exactly. The council attorney has to have this done
by this day. Exactly. Exactly. And that's the opportunity that I think is not getting talked enough
about is the opportunity of improvements in the efficiencies. I mean, the clerk staff, we could make
everything
not perfect, they're pretty damn near, you know, and prove the processes. So legal would legal, but
your counsel attorneys would do the legal stuff. Project-based fellows and perhaps a legal researcher
or whatever, if there's a restructure, whatever that may be, but then the maintenance of the records,
which is a part function, is done properly and efficiently and done well. So for example,
You know, we've had what I call light agendas for the past recent regular sessions. So when you have
something that's going to be, you know, four items for first reading and resolutions, and then three
items for second readings, and then maybe something into, like, you have to have that legal final eyes
on it. And then our final eyes on it to compile and make sure that all those components are a puzzle
that is properly put together and then distributed, which we have that.
expertise on a variety of levels to the project management aspect of it. And current staff in particular
are a big group of nerds. And we've really underlined that in the past month. Yeah, totally. And again,
thank you so much for all of that. But OK, so that comes back to the question. So one proposal is keep
somebody like Michael on.
Try to bring back Christine as an example. Then you had one other element of it. And then continue to
do some of the things, right? Is that a useful proposal? Can I add something on that too? So I might
have heard that there's some hourly limits to Michael. Let's see him very specifically. So that could
be however that position gets re-labeled, let's say,
that position would be responsible for the meetings, which could be, you know, five hours, you know,
so it's out of 14 hours, then the rest of that time could be constituent meeting support or constituent
support generally. So there's inquiries that come to Chelsea at the front desk that we've been kind
of handling sometimes because the goal is to help the member of the public. So it's, that could be,
a way to really effectively improve the process that's currently happening. And if I can also say, I
think you all probably agree that there's room for way more improvement in outreach for residents. And
that's the thing you just can't, you not even can't do, you can't even think of, which was back in the
process. We've got all this other stuff that they're doing. Exactly. Not just the council website. Yeah.
I mean, that could, that needs improvement. Yeah.
And all these background things that have been continuously put off since I've been hired could be addressed
very systematically. Yeah. And, but good for like six councils down the road to continuously improve.
Like it's not about this current situation. This is a really silver opportunity to make everything better.
Yeah. From A to Z quite honestly.
So my proposal was that you hire Larry Allen, you look into hiring this team, you hire at least one
of your fellow family members to support and you negotiate with the books office for all other duties,
but you will have to make some changes in the way it's structured overall because there are things that
the books office
literally does not have permissions to do what the computer systems do. It's a minor thing, basically,
but you guys will have to talk about it. I know you can't make a lot of these decisions as
before, ultimately, but it may be worth setting aside that time to hash out the details in council meeting
and say, this is what we propose, and this is what we work best and wrong. It's not gonna be worth it.
There's some council members who like
one aspect or versus another, I know this, but honestly. I think that's a really great, really great
proposal. I mean, is your thought that, just out of curiosity, is your thought that we would hire Christine
back in her original position?
Well, at the time she was here, she was a temp legal researcher in part because she had her LLM, but
she hadn't actually... Well, she was temp. She didn't have the full temp job. Honestly, I know you have
the positions available to you, but you have two or three positions. You have a legal researcher position
that you guys really want to explore how to do it. So she just has the bar? Yep. The legal research
position does not require JB. No, no. It doesn't even require her. It's a focus on the law, right?
Right. So it's a workaround. Yeah, it's a workaround. But it would change the whole approach because
you would say, doing it that way, what you're talking about. Clear on what that way is. I think what
the clerk is suggesting is that as a not saying go and do this, obviously, because it's not something
we can just go and do, but it is saying hire this person as your deputy attorney.
keep Larry Allen as your part-time lead attorney while you hire a lead attorney, and then have Michael
as temp as your legal researcher. Well, I wonder if, we don't even know if Christine wants to come back.
Correct, right. I wonder if Christine would be willing to have a job that is called temporary until
we hire the lead attorney.
Yeah. Yeah. Well, she might. Yeah. But also, whoever we hire, she didn't, wasn't it a majority council
opinion that that person should be able to hire their deputies? Yeah, that's right. I mean, that would
be more of a temporary. Well, that would be a reason to be temporary. Yeah, that's what I'm saying.
Yeah. But she may not be interested in that. She has JD now. She could go out and get a good job and
have a job security about waiting for
I'm happy to talk to her when I see her on Friday. I mean, I think she was very confident. She was great
at onboarding me. She was very, very good at the work that she did and asked a lot of great questions
when she was first coming on. I mean, I know that's getting into the weeds and everything, but there
are lots of people who can play that role. They can advertise in that way. But I think the temporary
dynamic of it
especially when you're talking about people being able to choose their deputies isn't important because
you didn't have that in the last time. Sometimes that can bring its own issues. I know I like being
able to choose people. Yeah. I will also stand on Cook's side of that, especially working with Lisa
and anyone new, is that having, like, I can't imagine a counsel attorney necessarily wanting to come
with this new, highly specific, high-demand role
with no mental health system, no institution or anything. Yeah, that is another thought. And definitely
you can't hire at every return. Like that's a lot of legal aid. Yeah, we can. I mean, it is an interesting
thought in the sense that if you have a good candidate within, I mean, basically what you would suggest
this person do is apply for the lead attorney job and then we could go to counsel and say, well, if
somebody applied,
You don't have to be Christine, it could be anybody else, right? Who applies, we're like, look, this
is a great person. We don't think that they're the right person for the lead attorney role, but we actually
think they would be an excellent person for the seventh role. And so what we're asking is the authority
to hire this person as such. We can have that conversation without even having to post the other role,
I mean. Yeah, it's a big conversation.
We have 17 minutes left. What else do we have to talk about? In terms of actions, I think it would be
really helpful. I think this is an interesting way you're going to talk to Christina if she's interested
in any way of working. Does she have a job currently? Because if she's interested in a temporal, I'm
going to talk to Michael.
I'm going to talk to Michael and get us to the same sense about his availability in long term. What
would be very useful, I think, in two stages here. The list that you have, I think, would be very useful
to separate and star things that you think are like
make most sense with the things that you're like, these are the things that we're happy to own. These
are the things that make sense for us to own. These are the things that we want to own that would even
make our lives easier if we owned or something like that.
Yeah. Well, I mean, that's fine, but let's see, but it's important if that's the position, right? If
you're like, look, there's nothing that we want to do, then that changes the whole dynamic.
If the conversation is like, look, there's something we want to do, but there's a broader conversation
about structures and A and blah, blah, blah, that's a different conversation than actually
don't want to do any of this stuff, right? So, so I think like being really, really clear about the
things that you think naturally fit, because then we can have the conversation about, okay, like,
you know, both of the temporary and the long-term, what needs to be covered here? Does that make sense?
So, so- Why the other person needs to be covered? Exactly. Because, because that's the other thing,
because, because even as- We don't expect you to take things without adequate resources. Right. But,
but, but that's a tiered question. It's like,
It's like, what are the things that make sense to exist in the Kirk's office long-term? I think question
one. Question two, what are the things that you're happy to do now? The answer is already on the list,
all of these things. But then the question then is, what's the best approach to that? Is the best approach
that we go and hire a temporary person who their job is to do those things? Or is the best approach
that we figure out some type of a structural adjustment so that it works for you all of the current
existence now, just realistically,
I don't, there's only really one mechanism to doing the structural adjustment and that's outside of
our hands. Like we couldn't, like that would be, that would require the mayor to involve themselves
and do a bonus payment or something like that. Like the other mechanism is long-term pay changes, right?
Or something like that. So anyways, my point is that you all have to come to some understanding about
that so that we can, we can structurally start to have that conversation, right? And so we're looking at,
I wrote down May 6th. I don't know where I got that. May 7th? What's May 7th? I think it's May 2nd,
right? What do you all... May 1st, right? May 1st. May 1st. May 1st. May 1st. May 1st. May 1st.
May 1st. May 1st. May 1st. May 1st. May 1st. May 1st. May 1st. May 1st. May 1st. May 1st. May 1st.
May 1st. May 1st. May 1st. May 1st. May 1st. May 1st. May 1st. May 1st. May 1st. May 1st. May 1st.
May 1st. May 1st. May 1st. May 1st. May 1st. May 1st. May 1st. May 1st. May 1st.
on me first, like if you'll just throw up your hands and laugh, like what would we notice, right? Like
what are things that would stop happening is essentially the question. And you know, trying to get that
to as little as zero as possible. I mean, for like for Jack Hawkins, that was like the bulk of the work
these past couple of weeks I would say. And I'm trying to work with Courtney to like preemptively compare
materials and have stuff ready so that
At least you guys have like stock to use or go off of. So if there's any other, I guess, situations
like that, we could do the same thing. But once we talk to Michael, I mean, because we have the author,
we can hire Michael, like we have the authority to do that within the structure. Yeah. Right. And so,
so if that works, I think that's the natural.
thing is to have Michael take essentially Aria's job for the summer, and then you would all hand over
everything to Michael. How many hours? What's your job? 29. Is it minimum and maximum of 29,
or up to 29? It's just up to 29. Are contracts done for your job? You know what, I can tell you about
this tomorrow.
Yeah, I'm responding to ours. No workplace that we haven't made an allocation of anything like that
yet. Okay, so that's, I think, tasks in regards to this, yeah, for everyone. Great. So are we, like,
are we going to have another meeting of this committee to hear back on those tasks, or? I think we need
to, yes. Yeah. But in terms of the- So we can make sure it may work covered. Yeah. Michael has agreed
to- Exactly, exactly.
But now from the committee, are you all comfortable? If Michael is happy to work 29 hours, are you all
comfortable with me working through our process to move on that? Yes. Okay. I don't think we need one.
I'm just asking for consensus. Yeah, we've covered that multiple times just to make sure we're all on
the same page. It's finally done.
Okay. So the other question that I have for you all is, as we now bring Larry on board, are there certain
things in any excess time that Larry has
that we'd like to leverage and keeping in mind that it's a high salary, but what other things can we
use Larry to do? Are there things that we'd like to say, by the end of this time, we love offing? Conflicting
legal opinions on what council can and can't do legally. It would be nice
to have rarity flush and work that out, especially in regards to. But that feels like a little bit,
that feels like a little bit in the normal flow of work knowing. But I'm asking, and that's quite an
important point because we also probably should think about how do we want, because we didn't have an
answer to this when we were full-time.
How do we test it? That's within the normal scope of things. How do we even test with that? Do we say
spend time equally amongst council members? Do we want him to report each week on how he's spending
time? I don't quite understand what Sidney was getting at.
Like, there are things that we're not sure. Yeah. And I think we've got that answered. Are you talking
about like, whether we can be involved with title 15 as an athlete?
or, well, I'm more referring to what are our leverage points with regards to the budget process, but
there have been multiple times where Councilor Rice has completely come up with a different legal opinion
than existing precedent. I guess I'm just not rebelling some of those things. But even then, that's
something that fits in, which I think is a very important thing to talk about as well, which is how
do we even task a person who's part of time?
how we want to deal with, you know, so that's a very valid thing that we need a lawyer for. Well, and
then there's legislation. Some legislation is not urgent. Right. Some legislation may be urgent. I mean,
if we find out that FLOC is not a safeguards, if we don't press them or whatever, we're going to want
FLOC legislation. Right. And I think that there's also this question, though, of like, you know,
In the past, we would say, and I think that's every council member's decision, one may feel more or
less comfortable with.
putting something forward before you have a full legal opinion on a thing. I mean, usually from my point
of view, I'm like, you put a separate ability product on it because things may come up that you're,
it'll actually be put in that way. Great, okay. That's why we put a set response on it, right? Like,
I don't know, but I think others, and depending on the thing that you're working on, right? You might
want a lot of specialness. Exactly, exactly. So, you know, so, but I think that's a hard question still.
It's like, what is the right way to task
We don't know that with our full-time staff. So I'm just really worried about the part-time. And when
I look at the hours of our external council for the PUD, they were spending all time. I mean,
it was like, I spent two hours talking on the phone to council member Sunso. And I spent an hour and
a half doing research for council member Sunso. And they'd call me and just tell me all this. And I'm
sort of like, okay, great. I mean, that's what you should do because council members have equal access
to you. But if we did that forever with this person,
we would have spent lots and lots of money. I think it also depends on the person. Yes. Yes. I think
the previous attorney that we had tended to repeat themselves and go on and on. Yes. Yes. Yes. But I
actually mean our external person. I'm talking about the, right? And I just mean our external, the people
that we just contracted with for the PD.
Right. It exploded, but the amount of hours we thought it was going to be ended up being like three
times that much money. And it's like, that's okay. Yeah. That's also like why I send them home halfway
through the meal. I was like, I was like, okay, I was spending a lot of money. Please go home. There's
two of you here. Like, you know, so, so, but I, but I think like, so, so what's the best way I'm doing
this? Like how? Question. So is that contract done with that law firm? No, we're, we're retaining them
in the case that we need
a pinch hitter like that again. And so Larry's start date is when? I don't know. And so the mayor just
says that she doesn't have the form that I'm waiting for. So as soon as you know, if you could let us
know, because a lot of the new onboarding and training would probably come from us, from clerk staff
in the sense of, well, quite honestly, like just even basics of the accessibility stuff that's happening.
bringing them up to speed, I think that I'd be okay with doing some training. And the good thing is
that there's like that institutional knowledge that Larry has from, you know, having been a city attorney
and a deputy mayor. You don't have to do the long run. Yes. Yes. Yes.
Question, since there's five minutes left, do we want to look at the schedule? We should, yeah.
Thank you. Oh, and just, you know, with regard to the accessibility stuff, we still have some training
materials that I put together last semester. Excellent. Excellent. So that stuff can kind of get transferred
over. I can talk a little bit with that, but RITS, the program, has made updates to our Google Workspace.
So if something was drafted months and months ago, it will need to be redone. OK, I'll take a look at
a lot of the stuff that probably still applies.
I'll have to look and see what updates there are. Could you all by chance do Thursday the 23rd? That
is after the regular session. Is that okay? Yes, I can do that. What would thoughts be? So I was going
to ask, because we've changed now the cadence of our scheduling meeting, what would thoughts be about
doing it when we would have done scheduling meeting in the morning?
I can't do it that afternoon, but Sophia didn't hear a little 30. I can make it work, but. You might
have the most sunshiny, bright, good smelling version. Well, alternative than we could do.
So it potentially would be, let's say, nine o'clock Thursday, April 23rd. Yeah. What time? I might have
to join virtually, but I just think that might be a nicer time for everyone than doing it at nighttime.
I guess somebody should check with him. Yeah, I can check with him. He did say that Thursdays were difficult.
So did he say that? I think so. I thought he said Tuesday through Thursday.
What are your, what is your, cause I'm out of town on the 21st and 22nd. So I could, I couldn't do,
um, which is I'm going to be virtual on the 22nd for the council meeting, but, um, I could do maybe
virtual on the 21st. Um, Oh, I can't. Okay. So didn't we just say,
We could do the, you wanted the evening of the 23rd? Is that better? Does it make a difference? I don't
know what date. Well, okay, but I can check with Dave, and then can I confirm with the clerk once I
check with Dave? So are we happy, you guys are both available at the sort of 8.30 time for Thursday,
and if that doesn't work, or we could do nine if that's more comfortable, but the 8.39 time on Thursday,
and then you guys are there anyways, the 23rd or,
we can do this time at 5.30 time, Thursday, 23rd. All those, all those scenes. I can't be there. I mean,
if you have a rough sketch out of those things, I can be the watcher. Yeah. Okay. And I won't be here
on it. I mean, when we hear it, it's, you know,
that was when you're supposed to celebrate, but that's fine. Like I don't have to be here. So we'll
look at both. I'll ask Dave and then we'll see which of those two times and with the bias for the morning.
So you're right. Okey-dokey. Thank you all. I know it feels like we're making slow progress, but I think
we're making a lot of progress on a thing that says that
Yeah, but again, I feel like we're getting a lot of clarity on paths forward for us. I know this feels
very meta, like a lot of these conversations, but I think they've been very helpful to help us make
some decisions. Well, I want to express deep appreciation to Corporal Dunn and the deputies for creating
this conference document that they self-passed. Yes, yes.
Yeah, she really direct most of that. All I did, I said Colleen, Colleen, I don't want this. Yeah. And
she made it happen. So you can thank me for asking for it. And we really thank her for doing it.
We're so, so, so grateful. Because that would be very helpful. Of course, and we're forward to see what
can be demonstrated for this. Yes. I understand. Thank you. Thank you both for, so we're so happy that
you are here. Yeah, whatever I remember from that year ago. For sure. We were separated a year ago.
Remember, remember. That is 630.