Review and Discuss Charter Amendment Timeline and Issues Proposed by the Council Subcommittee.  [Continued from March 19, 2019 to April 2, 2019]
Before a week. Okay. So thank you for that report. And then we have ten B, which is to review and discuss charter amendment timeline and issues proposed by the Council subcommittee. And there is an attachment on that one who's taken that. I think I'll start. And I want to start with that. These are these are in the opposite order I would have gone in. I just want to be clear that this list is mostly things that came out of my head. I don't want to say that it was I think our wires got cross. I had asked for it to be presented as kind of John's list plus where he thinks he remembers. Tony deleted the list that I had presented to Tony. Unfortunately for today, we wanted to get buy in off on any kind of proposed process for working through this. At the time that Tony and I met, we were really thinking we would be moving towards putting things on a march ballot. It turns out that depending on what we work on, there may be some things that can only go on a November ballot and that so but if we kind of start working towards a march, march date, that means those things that might be able to go a little later. We'll just have more time to discuss. If you I don't think yet, hopefully you had a chance to read this. But if you think about this, that this is that there's kind of three, three meetings, this first meeting to kind of see if there are general ideas within the charter that people do or do not want us to talk about. Now is a great time to to flag those. Tony and I will then take those to a workshop working with staff to to get input on kind of those general ideas, what the community is interested in doing. And then take the feedback we get, put it into some sort of kind of bullet pointed draft idea of how we might move forward and come back here for feedback. So the idea is that once rather than having a subcommittee that just goes off, write a bunch of stuff and comes back in December and says, We got , we've got it, we want to have a check in somewhere along the process pretty early on to make sure that everybody's agreeing that we're heading in the right direction and not heading off in someplace that the two of us think is awesome. But people don't. Once we have that, we would then probably go back to the after we get input from the council, we would go back out sometime in July to a second set of workshops for them for the for the issues to get further input. And we would be back to the Council between September and November, probably with a series of drafts with the idea of trying to get to December with a suite of it. Could be one thing, could be ten different issues. You know, this depends on what we decide to work on, but a potential suite of charter amendments that we would then put on the ballot for March and or November. Can I. Okay. Any questions? Comments? Anyone want to add? Anything? Yeah. Councilmember Avila So a couple questions for the workshop and workshop. Is it possible to just agenda as though so that members, other members of the council can attend? I appreciate the subcommittee working on it, but I also think that it would and I'm not saying that we would have to attend, but if it could at least be agenda, is it in accordance with our sunshine? That way we could. We could if other council members want to attend. I mean, I in particular would like to hear the input and everything else. So I think that's a question for both the city clerk and the city. Acting City Attorney Ken. Well, the the the rule is that you can it's not impermissible for a a member of the council to attend a subcommittee. You just can't participate in it. So if you're just there to listen, then we we wouldn't have to notice that as a council meeting per se. Right. But I wouldn't be able to like ask questions or anything. Right. Yeah. So if you if you want to participate in any respect, the safer course of action would be to notice it as a council meeting. And again, in order to do that, you know, there's certain timeline requirements that we would have to meet. So if you want to do it that way, then that's the city clerk know so we can get it agenda agendas properly. I'm sorry, Kirk. Did you want to add to that? We that rule require the seven days notice, and we could definitely just put out that to allow the whole council to attend and just to be cautious. And speak, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. That agenda that we say is allowing the council to attend and gives you that. But we also notice that no minutes will be prepared and it's not a formal. Yeah. Okay. Any other questions? Comments. I mean. My comment is kind of similar to Malia's. I mean, in workshop, there's a lot of media items that. You know, I pretty specifically remember what the charge of the revision was, and that was to kind of clarify the do's and don'ts of council members and like ranked choice voting, campaign finance, how we elect the mayor. You know, district elections. I mean, those are meaty issues that I don't think any of us had had an opportunity to weigh in on. So I'd be hesitant to, you know. Just have like a workshop and then it comes back to us and you know, we don't have a lot of input on it before a lot of work gets done on it. I mean, that's my my concern on those because, I mean, there's a lot of scope creep here that I'm a little concerned about. I mean, if the group has the the time, I guess they can do it. But I wasn't expecting something so ambitious. I mean, I've just been pushed. Back by vice mayor vice. The charge, I was told was, look at the charter, everything is fair game. So I'm not sure where where the where the limited scope came from. I think I just want to say, yeah, I, you know, whatever we want to do, the goal of Tony and I bringing this here was literally to get input on areas of interest and to lay out a process whereby the council would be brought in before the media work was taken care of to make sure that there was that discussion. Okay. I threw the chair. Through the. Chair. Thank you. I guess my point is those issues are meeting in mid April is three weeks away. So to have something ready, I just don't know if there's enough time to to discuss it and vet it through the community because those are some meaty changes that, you know. Just changes. Yeah. And so I I'm going to just chime in. I and I do appreciate the the work that the subcommittee did. I but I also concur, I think in part with what Councilmember Odie is saying. Some of this, and I certainly did say go over the charter with a fine tooth comb and see what changes you think need to be done and triage it, because obviously you can't do everything at once and some things are more urgent than others. So the district election in ranked choice voting I think is a bit outside the scope of the charter. I mean, maybe that's arguable, but I, I do it. But, you know, some of these things like paid signature gatherer rules, I don't believe it's addressed in the charter now, but maybe it should be or maybe somewhere else. I do remember saying that at our swearing in that I think for a matter of public trust, something that came up in, you know, the last. Year. Is that so? What happens when a council member is found to be in violation of the charter, then, you know, what are what are the remedies? What are the actions? So I would say that's a. Little. Beyond clarify council interference language. So anyway, those are those are my thoughts. Councilmember Day So yeah, going into it, what I shared with um, Vice Mayor Knox White as well as the staff is my view that whatever issues that we pursued had to have some form of and I mean this in the classic sense, political legitimacy that is it had to arise out of some issue about which everyone understood to be an issue. But by the same token, I don't recall us having been told that limit ourselves to issues. So while I myself might have held a hat that said, okay, this is how I'm going to this is the lens through which I'm going to look at issues. You know, I was open to listening to what the public had to have the public had in mind or what fellow council members had in mind. Now, if tonight fellow council members are saying, okay, we want you to limit it. Okay, well, that's the point of tonight is to is to help us. Okay. So are you saying these items are all in the charter or should be? Is that what you're saying? Oh, well, if you're asking me what I'm interested in as a council member, what I'm interested in as a council member is addressing issues regarding council member. What was the issue it being involved in employment and and and and kind of. Yeah. And fleshing out the the remedies. If the remedies are appropriate for the charter. I'm not sure they are, by the way, but if they are fleshing it out, I'm also interested in what I believe is at the top of my head. I believe in section two, Dash four, which has to do with qualifications for council members. And I think the qualifications to dash for says that if you're a federal legislator, state legislator or county legislator, you cannot be involved in commissions or things like that. And I would expand to Dennis for four reasons that I am happy to go into later. But I think it's to dash four, by the way. So so I am interested in in dealing with, you know. Dealing with the issues that our community dealt with in 2018. And I think that's an appropriate place. But by the same token, I think our charge was to look at other issues. So. So just for clarification, the the title of this is Review and Discuss Charter Amendment Timelines. So you say you look to the charter and you thought perhaps it should be amended to address all of these things. No, no, no, no, no. I am not bought into all those things I am most interested in to. This is not a mutually drafted document. No. Okay. Okay. Is that Councilmember Vela. Not. Giving to the late hour? And the fact that I think this this conversation might better suit us to a different time. I think what I'm hearing is perhaps there needs to be a little more council discussion on what the topics specifically are. And I think that there, you know, perhaps we could continue this conversation to the next meeting and with the specific mindset of we are we now understand that we're trying to set up a couple of workshops, but we're also trying to narrow the scope of what those workshops will cover. And if we could at the next meeting, all come with kind of what we think should be covered. We can have that discussion and then we can actually approve or set out a timeline. How does that sound to the subcommittee and then others? Oh, what's that? What do I need to do? Oh, we have to just. You're fine. I just to give you guys a little more background since your thinking about coming back, just for your mindset, please. The distinction that Vice Mayor mentioned earlier is in election code section 14, dash 15, and I can shoot an email off to you tomorrow. But it basically prohibits an employment type of anything that's related to employees. And you all are considered employees from being on the March election. And one more thing about the March election and putting anything on that date would the city would then be paying for participating in that election, which be in addition to anything to consider for the March date as you're coming back just to open your head? No, that's helpful thing. Okay. Okay. And Councilor Brody, I just want. To clarify, because I was intimately involved in this. The impetus of this was that there was a charter provision that an investigator found was unclear and vague. So his recommendation was to look at that charter provision and kind of clarify the do's and don'ts, what's allowed, what's not allowed. And if you read the document, that was the impetus. You'll see that there is a process outlined to deal with that in statute. And I think that the city attorney could probably update anyone that's not familiar with that process. So I think we need to be careful and not overstep our boundaries and make sure that we abide by the statutes in that that the state as adopted in this area. Well, I am again, I think Councilmember Vella is correct that the hour is late and we will have a more productive discussion. But I think that anything should be able to be discussed. What we decide is something else. So, Madam Clerk, can we just continue this item? Do I need a vote. To do that or. Is that okay with everyone? Okay with you? Okay. All right. Okay. All right. So. So thank you. And then, Councilman Rudy, did you want to speak briefly on Tennessee? No. Let's just talk about it next time. Okay. So then we are at adjournment and I'm going to ask everybody if we could adjourn. We started the meeting on a happy note with the announcement of our new city attorney said they were going to end on a sad note because I want to adjourn the council meeting in memory of some people. Who. Who lost their lives in the last couple of weeks. One of them is Victor McElhaney. He was 21 years old, the son of my friend and Oakland City Councilmember Lynnette Gibson McElhaney. His mother attended our swearing in ceremony in in December. She was introduced, if you remember. And very tragically, he was a gifted musician studying at USC and just out on a Saturday night. And he and some friends were held up and he got shot and killed. And it's you know, there is nothing where you can say, but I want to do his memory, the honor of remembering him tonight. And at the same time, I want us to adjourn in honor of the I believe it's now 50 victims of the terrorist attacks on two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand. Last week, again, more a sense of gun violence, but maybe on a a little more positive note. I also want to announce that this Saturday, March 23rd at 6:30 p.m., I'm right here in front of City Hall. The Islamic Center of Alameda is presenting a solidarity vigil with Muslims. And so I hope that you all can attend and members of the public who might listen to this tape later, I hope you can attend, too . But if we could just rise and have a moment of silence and then this is adjourned. Thank you, everyone. Thank you all. Good night.