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The Pleasanton City Council discussed two options to restructure four of the city’s commissions last month. After hearing concerns from speakers on an option that would have combined the Library and Civic Arts commissions, the council decided to approve a second option that keeps all four commissions intact, but instead reduces the number of seats for each.
Following the decision during the Feb. 20 council meeting, the Civic Arts, Human Services, Library, and Parks and Recreation commissions will now be reduced to seven members, including one youth member for each. Each commission will also not be offering an alternate position moving forward.
“We have a long standing record of … public engagement and this is one of the wonderful ways to get involved,” Pleasanton Mayor Karla Brown said during the meeting. “That’s why this is a big lift for our commissions such as civic arts.”
In February 2023, staff presented an overview of the city’s current commission and committee structure with the goal of aligning the city’s organizational structure, which is one of the goals listed in the city’s five-year One Pleasanton strategic plan.
Library and recreation director Heidi Murphy told the council that by doing so, it would streamline opportunities for community input and engagement, and would increase the efficiency of commission and committee members as well as supporting staff.
“Since the current commission structure was created, the city has changed in many ways,” Murphy said. “With fewer projects coming forward for community and commission input, the workload has steadily declined. Similarly, many policies have been established and are now in standard operation, so instead of needing to meet regularly to develop those policies, they now need to be reviewed about every five years on average.”
Since that meeting last year, the council appointed an ad hoc subcommittee that included councilmembers Valerie Arkin and Jack Balch to help review the existing commission and committee structure and recommend modifications.
At a later meeting in October 2023, staff presented the four commissions in question to the council as ones they could look at modifying — the council then instructed staff to develop recommendations for these commissions, which were presented at the meeting Feb. 20.
Staff worked on breaking down the workload of each commission by looking at the action items each commission carried out over the past five years, rather than the administrative work each was doing.
“Administrative items were things like selection of chair and vice chair, selection of committee assignments, things like that,” Murphy explained.
The data showed how the Civic Arts and Human Services commissions averaged five and a half action items each year, the Library Commission averaged four and a half, and the Parks and Recreation Commission averaged a little over 13 action items.
With this data, staff then worked with the ad hoc committee to come up with two recommendations to reorganize the four commissions.
The first was to combine the Library and Civic Arts commissions into one and reduce the number of commissioners in those two and the Human Services Commission down to seven, just like the Parks and Recreation Commission. That recommendation would have also reduced the number of meetings for each commission, kept two youth members in each and would have eliminated the alternate position for only the Parks and Recreation Commission.
However, several members of the public made it clear to the council that they did not want to see the Civic Arts Commission being combined with any other group, which is a sentiment that many council members said they also heard through many emails and calls.
“I advocate for keeping all the commissions separate,” Kelly Cousins, president of the Pleasanton Cultural Arts Council, told the council.
“The Civic Arts Commission has been a conduit to many art projects,” she added. “Before you receive any information about these pieces, it has to come through the Civic Arts Commission and I know that they have worked many, many hours along with other commissions to make sure that that information gets to you.”
Nancy Harrington, a retired educator and philanthropist who has worked alongside her husband to further art projects in Pleasanton, also spoke on the importance of maintaining the Civic Arts Commission as a separate entity so that it can continue to effectively bring more art projects forward in the city.
“We believe if the arts commission is combined with another commission, the message to further art or public art in Pleasanton is no more. That’s the message it’s sending,” Harrington said.
Following the public input, the motion was made to go with staff’s second recommendation, which maintains each of the commissions as separate entities. However, Arkin did make an adjustment to the recommendation, requesting that all four commissions have seven members.
Arkin’s motion also made it so that each commission maintains one youth member, which Brown said was crucial to have.
“I appreciate a little bit larger group and still retaining the youth members on these commissions,” Brown said. “These are also life-changing where a person who was in middle school, or in these cases high school, gets to understand how a city works. They get to understand how they can make a change within their own community, and that’s extremely rich.”
Apart from eliminating the alternate member positions, Councilmember Julie Testa also amended Arkin’s motion so that the commissions could meet more than the mandated six meetings every year.
“When I was on the Human Service Commission. I did not feel that we were void of activity with meeting every month,” Testa said. “I never felt that we had a meeting where we had nothing to do or didn’t have anything important.”
Murphy said that with the second recommendation, reducing the number of members in the Library and Civic Arts commissions would happen immediately and “subsequent reductions through attrition could take place by April of 2025.”
She said the reduction in members for the other two commissions would also be effective immediately.
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