The Government Operations Committee held its first organizational meeting of the term on January 12, 2026, chaired by Councilmember Brown. The primary objective was to establish a structure for transparency and accountability through the creation of detailed work plans for all assigned topics. The committee discussed the framework for these plans, emphasizing the need for timelines, performance metrics, and public access via a dedicated website. Subcommittees were proposed for major items, often including non-council experts, to handle specialized legislative tasks such as election reform, land management code rewriting, and tax rate reviews.
Work Plan Framework and Transparency
Budget Monitoring and CIP Oversight
Election Reform Subcommittee
Justice and Police Reform
Land Management Code Rewrite
Employee Relations and Collective Bargaining
Charter Changes and Redistricting
Taxes, Water Rates, and Inter-Agency Relations
Libby, we're gonna get started soon. Can you hear me? Okay. If you need to take your camera off for any reason, it's totally acceptable. Like if you need to get up and get some juice or a snack or okay. City team, we ready? Yeah. Good. All right. Good afternoon and welcome to the January twelfth government operations meeting, our first committee meeting of this term. Please stand for the Pledge of Allegiance as you're able. Thank you very much. Councilmember Brown. I echo your comments. Thank you. And Councilmember Taylor, it's okay if you can't join us, but certainly if you'd like to after your comments at any point in the meeting, we welcome them. The purpose of today's meeting is to basically be an organizational meeting for the government operations committee. This committee and all of our other our other two other committees were formed via vote last week. And so if you're following along at home, we do have an agenda. And in that agenda, we do have what topics may be considered as part of this committee. Our goal, our intention, at least for this committee, is to put these work plans in the public realm, hopefully via a website that we create for the committee with the mayor and team's help, of course, uh, so that the public can follow along, and as people are interested in following along these topics, they can be plugged into where we are in our work plan. Ms. Phyllis, if I could ask, uh can you toggle over to our draft work plan. I just want to briefly go through the elements of a work plan so that the committee um and all of this is up for discussion and tweaking. We're kind of certainly uh building the airplane in the sky as we go. But we are endeavoring to outline a work plan for every topic that the committee will proceed forward with, and again, those topics are listed in the agenda. And those topics just for total transparency are ongoing budget monitoring, purchasing guidelines, and contracts, elections, technology, justice and police reform, land management code, and and or a charter rewrite um employees, including the police, and taxes. And so we have before us on the screen a draft of a work plan. And again, I I wrote this, so this is certainly uh up for committee discussion. But the goal is to create one of these for each one of these topics, and then if there's a subcommittee, also create a work plan for the subcommittee. And the goal, of course, is not to put parameters around our work, but it's really just to document what we're working on and add transparency and accountability, certainly put timelines to things when possible. There are going to be some things that are just ongoing, but to the extent that we can outline what we're working on for the public, it would be probably beneficial to put some sort of timeline around it. So, what I've done is I've outlined this is for technology, and I literally just picked one. Um, I've outlined the purpose and why we're doing what we're doing, the scope of what we're doing. And then if you proceed down, I've included uh phases of our work. And again, I tend to be very optimistic about when things are gonna happen and how quickly they're gonna happen. And I've learned through many many years of working in government that sometimes those timelines shift and they shift for very good reason, but they do shift, and so we have to be flexible, of course, but always have goals. And then the goal, of course, will be to match those phases with work tasks as we move forward. And so the purpose of today's meeting is to put it out in the public realm that this is something we're gonna be working on. This is what we're gonna what we're gonna draft. Um the monitoring and the publishing of these work plans will be hopefully an ongoing living document. And the goal is also to check in with these work plans, if not every meeting, every meeting that we have one of these topics comes up, just to sort of say, okay, this is where we are, and this is what we're working on, just to keep some sort of map of what we're what we're doing and why. So that's that's a draft work plan. That's what that will tentatively look like. And again, we're gonna come back to this. Um council members, I'll take a first draft many of these, unless when we're gonna talk today about um subcommittees. Uh, if you're leading a subcommittee, certainly please uh take on said work plan and and have that, and I'm happy to help. I know Clara will help as well. Um our goal, of course, is to start getting these ready so that we can have them published and start really getting into the work as soon as we can. Chair, thank you for putting this draft together.