EVERETT — The Everett City Council has voted to reconstitute subcommittees, reversing a five-year-old decision to hear all policy proposals during their regular meetings.
The action, proposed by councilman Paul Roberts, will create three subcommittees focused on budgeting and finance, public safety, and general government. They will each be composed of three council members meeting immediately before the first three regular council meetings of each month.
Under the new policy, the subcommittee meetings will be open to the public and televised. The subcommittees will take no actions on ordinances or resolutions except to make recommendations to the full council.
The four council members not assigned to a particular committee, along with the public, will be permitted to observe those committee meetings, but will not be able to take part in any manner.
The measure passed by a 4-3 vote, with Councilmembers Roberts, Brenda Stonecipher, Judy Tuohy and Scott Bader supporting. Councilmembers Jeff Moore, Scott Murphy and Ron Gipson voted against.
Moore said he’s concerned that members of the council who are not on a particular committee wouldn’t get the same information as committee members.
“I’m just going to miss out on the information, or it will be diminished,” Moore said.
Murphy worried that the work of the council would become more inefficient with another step in the deliberative process. Bader echoed Murphy’s concern, before announcing that he was willing to give the proposal a chance.
Roberts said that rather than gumming up the works, the subcommittees were designed to explore in more detail some of the more complex issues the council has to face, rather than relying on an accelerated three-week process from initial briefing to vote.
Committees were abolished in 2010 in favor of a single committee-of-the-whole, in part because at the time committee meetings were held outside of public view, in violation of the Open Public Meetings Act.
Roberts, who was council president at the time, led the change in policy at that time, too.
The result, however, has not lived up to his expectations of open communication between Mayor Ray Stephanson’s administration and the council.
During the debates about the city’s deficits, which led to raising taxes, several council members, including Roberts, said they were caught off-guard and felt cut out of the policymaking process.
Then last week, during a debate about the county courthouse, Stonecipher presented a study that showed a new parking garage would never recoup the money invested to build it, which the city apparently hadn’t shared with the council.
The state’s open meetings law requires elected officials to conduct the public’s business in public. That can be challenging, Roberts said.
“Because of (the open meetings act) we can’t talk to each other. We sometimes feel we’re painted into a corner and given a brush and asked to finish the job,” Roberts said.
Most routine issues are handled using he existing structure just fine, he said, and his proposal was designed with the assistance of the city’s legal office to comply with state law.
Stephanson said the council had already done good work in debating issues such as the courthouse and budget, and that its existing policies for ad hoc committees and a new policy to hold an annual retreat should be sufficient to achieve their goals.
The council plans to figure out how to implement the new committees in forthcoming meetings.
Chris Winters: 425-374-4165; cwinters@heraldnet.com. Twitter: @Chris_At_Herald.
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