EVERETT — Ron Gipson will serve as the Everett City Council president next year.
His colleagues on the council voted unanimously for him to serve in a leadership role beginning Jan. 1.
In turn, Gipson selected Councilman Jeff Moore to serve as his vice president for 2012.
The president of the City Council isn’t just an honorary title. Council presidents shoulder the burden of extra behind-the-scenes work, including assembling the agenda for council meetings and mediating council meetings.
Gipson, a corrections officer at the Denney Juvenile Justice Center, is about to wrap up his fourth term on the council; he’s served the longest of any of those on the council now.
This his first time serving as council president.
Gipson said one of his priorities will be continuing to ensure the people’s business is done in public. He plans to revisit how the council conducts its work to see if the council should go back to holding some committee meetings. In the past, those meetings gave council members a chance to dig deep into issues such as the city budget or transportation.
The council passed a lean set of rules about how it does business last year. Part of those rules included doing away with committees and instead doing that background work at regular council meetings. That way the public and all seven members of the council would hear the same information.
The new format isn’t working as well as it should, Gipson said. The council doesn’t have enough buy-in on what’s going on early enough in the process, he said. They’re not hearing the depth and breadth of information they used to from the city’s administration.
He suggested perhaps “study sessions” could be held just before regular council meetings in which the public could attend if interested.
Reporter Debra Smith: 425-339-3197 or dsmith@heraldnet.com
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