[bouldercouncilhotline] Hotline: Potential 2011 Ballot Issues

[kohls at bouldercolorado.gov]

Sender: Appelbaum, Matt

Colleagues,

Since I proposed several of these items (and received my expected 15 seconds of "fame" for one of them!), I'd like to offer a question and a few comments before our short discussion about this on Tuesday:


n  P.29, re initiated measures, lines 8 - 11: this seems to describe what happens if a 5% petition meets certain criteria (it is put on the next election ballot), but doesn't seem to say what happens otherwise (it waits for another year?).

n  P.37 -38, re board membership: my proposal, as it has been for a number of years, is simply to increase the OSBT to 7 members in order to better reflect the very wide set of interests in OS.  I'm not interested in changing the size of all boards (although having 7-member boards seems reasonable to me), or of any other specific board at this time.  Somehow, the draft wording went off in a particularly odd - and completely unsupportable - direction that would allow council to decide the size of boards, and change those sizes by ordinance, which would of course lead to the quite reasonable concern that a council could resize and "pack" a board any time it so wished.

n  P.40, compensation: I've raised this issue several times as well.  I think we all know that being paid per meeting is rather odd, but even more bizarre is the limitation of 4 meetings per month.  My suggestion was to keep the attendance requirement (silly, but hard to change at this point), but essentially replace the monthly limit with a yearly one.  That is attempted in the draft wording, although I'd much prefer a higher limit of, say, 60 meetings per year (keeping the compensation per meeting just as it is).  Perhaps more importantly, we need to resolve related issues, such as charging for "expenses."  Clearly, certain one-time expenses for city-related travel, etc. will always need to be handled as they are now.  But some have suggested a monthly stipend for regular/common expenses; many cities do this, although I'm not a big fan.  The subcommittee examining this issue needs to meet, but some direction from council is essential - and I think all issues related to compensation/expenses need to be resolved before we decide what, if anything, to put on the ballot.  One more thought: I think the definition of "meeting" needs to be re-examined; I still don't know what counts as a meeting or how it's decided (and requiring a "quorum" isn't clear to me, but maybe I'm just missing something).

n  P.41, re executive sessions: my only intent here is to see if there is sufficient interest to have staff start to look at how such an option might be handled, with stricter requirements and limitations than the underlying state statute.  It's quite obvious to me that we are considerably weakened in negotiations (one need only note that Boulder County, Jeffco, Superior, Golden, and presumably Broomfield and Arvada all met in secret re Jefferson Pkwy).  If nobody is interested, that's fine; if enough are, then some direction to staff is called for, and it might well be wise to have this come back next year.

--Matt