News Brief

As if by magic: Commission agendas appear

December 9, 2010 1:28 pm by Lance Knobel

When we wrote about the Peace & Justice Commission resolution to honor Pfc. Bradley Manning yesterday, there was a grand total of a single minutes from a commission meeting this year available on the city’s website. It looks like attention produces action. All the minutes agendas from this year’s meetings are now on the commission’s site. Update But there are still no minutes of those meetings.

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  • jjohannson

    Does anyone know what the Peace and Justice Commission’s budget is and where to find it? I have some vague notion that it is staffed on a volunteer basis, and that it is its recommendations that one way or the other result in hits to the city budget, but I can’t be sure.

  • DC

    Nope. No minutes at all are available. Just agendas. There’s no record of what was decided or actions taken.

  • laura menard

    All commissions have paid city staff assigned to act as secretaries . Only four commissions have any real power and position within city operations. In the area of public health services Berkeley maintains several commissions whose missions overlap. These commissions could be combined reducing redundancy which might improve program efficiencies.

    Years ago when our neighborhood sought the support of Mayor Bates to deal with street level drug dealing, Bates staff suggested I go to the Peace and Justice commission to gain their interest in addressing crime at home. I said NO, since the P& J commission could not direct police and code enforcement dept to focus on crime reduction, that was the city manager and mayor job. Typical runaround.

  • http://www.davosnewbies.com Lance Knobel

    DC: you’re right. I was too quick to be charitable. There are only agendas on that page. Still no minutes.

  • http://jdtangney.com John Tangney

    Wouldn’t it be nice if all this data was automatically published and available? Look a what the Feds are doing: http://.data.gov/

    I have been trying to get an answer from the Mayor’s office about what the City’s intentions are regarding opening City electronic data. They said they’d forwarded my request to the IT department, but that was the last I heard from either department.

  • Peggy

    Hey B-side, that photo is the school district office. We need a photo of City Hall even if she isn’t the most photogenic gal on the block.

  • http://www.davosnewbies.com Lance Knobel

    Thanks, Peggy. The correct photo has been swapped in.

  • Jesse Townley

    Paid staff time for commissions is pretty minimal. The bulk of the work is done by the volunteer commissioners.

    Think about it from the other way- if there was LESS citizen oversight of local government, wouldn’t a lot of you be even more upset? Just because a particular commission may ask the City Council to do something you don’t like or don’t think is necessary, doesn’t mean the entire system is bad.

    Also, proposals from advisory Commissions (the vast majority of them) are forwarded to the City Council and have no force of law unitl/if the Council passes them. This is really useful because it allows the City Council to have a series of experienced experts in various fields work w/ staff and others on creating decent public policy OR allows a series of community experts in various fields to push initiatives that current staff may not value as highly (initially).

    Here’s an example: our commission, the Disaster & Fire Safety Commission, is the reason that every school in Berkeley has a large emergency disaster cache on the grounds. That idea came from us (before my time on it, probably 2000? 1998?) and picked up support as it traveled through the city’s bureaucracy. Now, if the next earthquake strikes during a school day, the children will have trained help & adequate supplies, and if it’s outside of school hours, the city’s emergency services have some good caches for neighborhood relief efforts.

  • Jesse Townley

    P.S.- I am always frustrated by the lack of minutes for various commissions. It really slows down public involvement.

  • laura menard

    Jesse,

    The history of how the schools finally received emergency caches was a more convoluted, complicated and lengthy process than you suggest, I was involved for years on the school safety side of this effort. Worst yet is the problem and lack of consistent school staff training/planning on making use the equipment in the cache. I could list many more dysfunctional elements regarding the city disaster planning processes since I served for many years on both district-wide school safety and city wide safe neighborhood committee,BSNC.