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The Pleasanton City Council approved the formation of an ad hoc committee that will take feedback from the Feb. 7 council meeting to develop recommendations for potentially altering the city’s existing committee and commissions.
According to City Manager Gerry Beaudin, the discussion on restructuring how the committees and commissions will look like in the future was important because it will help streamline the way those appointed bodies work with the council on future projects.
“The committee and commission structure has grown over the years, our organization has changed and the opportunities for people to participate in the public process have become layered in some cases and maybe less efficient than they could be,” Beaudin told the council.
The city of Pleasanton has seven commissions that each provide different recommendations to the council on different issues: Planning, Housing, Civic Arts, Human Services, Library, Parks and Recreation, and Youth commissions.
The city also has three committees — Bicycle Pedestrian and Trails Committee, the Committee on Energy in the Environment and the Economic Vitality Committee — that are more focused on specific subject areas.
But as assistant city manager Pamela Ott said, Pleasanton has changed as a city since these groups were first established.
She added that since there are already two city priority items to restructure the Economic Vitality Committee and to evaluate the structure of the Youth Commission, city staff figured this was a good time to start a larger review of the city’s commission and committee structure.
“With some reorganization or restructuring, we could think about how we better align our commissions and committees with the city’s organizational structure, how we could streamline those opportunities for community input and engagement through our commissions and committees and also how we could increase efficiency and impact for both the commission committee members as well as supporting staff members,” Ott said.
Some of the key feedback that the ad hoc committee, which will be made up of Vice Mayor Jack Balch and Councilmember Valerie Arkin with city staff, will look at includes formal training for new members, updating their roles and responsibilities, and merging commissions where possible.
Another issue that the council agreed on was how input from the different commissions and committees fails to sometimes reach the different elected officials.
“We’re the funding body … We’re the one that allocates funds, and if they can’t get a good communication line with us, they have to jump around, which we don’t want them to do but sometimes through desperation, people do that,” Mayor Karla Brown said.
Balch also added to that saying he also wants to see the vertical communication from the committees and commissions to the council be improved.
“The commissioners want to be of use to our city and I think we’re disenfranchising them from that at times, based upon what they ultimately see percolate up,” Balch said. “So I agree with investing in the formal training, tightening up the subcommittee’s — maybe the roles — and staffing them appropriately.”
Beaudin touched on that issue saying that there might be a way to create an annual work plan for committees and commissions to better set expectations around how they will be engaged on specific issues.
“If you have come through the traditional work planning process, you might have one or two projects and that may not keep a committee or commission busy for the entire year or it may not even be initiated in year one of the work plan,” Beaudin said. “For those who have been through it, you know that sometimes things get deferred to year two, or they may not even be prioritized in the work planning process but they live on the list because they originated there. That can be somewhat frustrating because your idea is not moving forward.”
Other things that the newly formed ad hoc committee will look at are reducing the amount of members in the Economic Vitality Committee — because of the fact that there are currently 22 members compared to the maximum of seven or nine on the others — and create an overall sense of consistency between all the groups.
“I view all of this as an opportunity to engage in continuous improvement and to remove barriers to the effectiveness of the various commissions,” Councilmember Jeff Nibert said.
The ad hoc committee will discuss this feedback and city staff will bring the discussion back to the council for further action at a later date.
