Agenda - 05-12-2015 - 2 - Laserfiche WebLink

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34 Approved 11/5/14 753 meeting where the Planning Board has a quorum versus requiring Planning Board members to attend and if you 754 have bad attendance then the Commissioners can do something about it, like say thank youfor your service but 755 you’re not cutting it. We’re going to be there and we’re going to hear the public hearing input. The commissioners 756 certainly have the ability while we’re there, even if it’s not a joint meeting, to ask if there are any comments fromthe 757 Planning Board. It’s well within their purview so I just don’t see that dropping the official joint with a quorum 758 requirement, I don’t think that will change the process a whole lot. What it will do is not hold up a meeting where you 759 have 100 citizens there. 760 761 Craig Benedict: From what I’m hearing from the discussion, there seems to be somewhat of a role of the Board in a 762 differentiation between how they act on a legislative matter, where they can hear opinions left and right, they can 763 hear the community and they can see the site versus the quasi-judicial nature where your role is more structured. 764 Not that we are making any determinations tonight, but maybe when we do this interim report, maybe there are two 765 different processes that we follow for legislative matters versus a quasi-judicial and right now they’re clustered 766 together and maybe we should take a look at the role of the Board on a legislative matter and how we get input 767 versus a quasi-judicial matter follow a different tract. Does that sound reasonable? 768 769 Pete Hallenbeck: In general, what I’m hearing, and I realize there is variation everywhere, is everybody agrees there 770 is great value in having the Planning Board at the quarterly public hearing. The challenge is if you don’t have a 771 quorum, we don’t want that to derail anything. I am also hearing people are happy with this concept that the Planning 772 Board can take citizen input so we can get that sooner and hopefully that combined with the 45 days will just make 773 everything go better. Most of what we’ve been talking about is for the legislative processes which are 88% of the 774 time. The quasi-judicial is a different process and we need to work on knowing what our role is in that. That may be 775 something staff and the attorney can work on to educate us on that a little bit better but again 88% of the time it is 776 legislative and it would be great to also notify all Planning Board member of any neighborhood information meeting 777 that is going on so we have a chance to get out there and see what is going on. Those are the main points I’m 778 pulling out. Is there anything major anyone can think of? 779 780 Laura Nicholson: So, is the idea that we will have quorum and we’ll all just internally say we are going to be better 781 about getting quorum or was there some barrier that maybe some of us that are new don’t understand why we 782 couldn’t get a quorum before? 783 784 Pete Hallenbeck: My personal opinion is to drop the quorum requirement because we’ve blown it two or three times 785 and if we blow it one more time, it is just, it’s getting to the point it’s not excusable and that’s also based on the fact 786 that if we can just impress upon people how important it is to be there, it’s not clear what the quorum is doing and the 787 Commissioners can still ask Planning Board members who are present for comments and input. 788 789 Laura Nicholson: It’s just funny that you’re saying we need to make sure that we all know that it’s really important to 790 be there but it’s not a requirement. If it’s really important to be there it should be a requirement. 791 792 Pete Hallenbeck: It should but then when you don’t have it, we were lucky that we had only a 30 minute delay. What 793 would happen if you had a meeting and you didn’t have quorum and you tell all these people I’m sorry we just don’t 794 have the people,we’ll try this again in three months. 795 796 Laura Nicholson: I agree I just don’t see howwecan’t have a quorum. 797 798 Lisa Stuckey: Why don’t we ask staff, what’s the problem? Do we know why people haven’t shown up? What’s 799 been the issue? 800 801 Perdita Holtz: I think it just depends on the personalities that you have on the Board. How seriously people take their 802 position. 803 804 Tina Love: There has never been a time when staff went to the meeting without a quorum. I have never left work at 805 the end of the day that staff didn’t have a quorum. If I haven’t heard from you, I get on the phone and I call you and I 806 keep on calling until I reach you, and I’m sorry about that, but we have to ensure there is a quorum. Then staff gets 15