Good morning.

Welcome to today's meeting of the Rules and Economic Development Committee.

Let the record reflect that we have a quorum consisting of Vice Chair Faulkner, Councilmember Alvarez, and myself.

We do expect Councilmember Kersey to arrive shortly.

Councilmember Emerald is absent today.

Also here with us, including committee staff are Carrie Gleason from the Office of the City Attorney.

Thank you all for being here.

We will begin with non-agenda public comment, and there are no items, no speaker slips on that, and there are no speaker slips on regulatory streamlining open government and economic development, non-agenda public comment.

We are in communication with the Go Biz office staff, and we plan to take this discussion up on July 24th when more concrete details about the new program are available.

Are there any comments from the city attorney, IBA, or mayoral staff?

Okay.

And then are there any committee comments?

Okay.

And as I noted already, the uh first item, which was to be a presentation from the Governor's Office of Business and Economic Development regarding Assembly Bill 93 and Senate Bill 90 relating to enterprise zones and the governor's new economic development initiatives will be continued until the July 24th, 2013 meeting.

So the next item on the agenda, item two is report from the city clerk regarding elections.

Okay.

I'm being reminded I skipped an item.

No, sit down, sit down.

The minutes are deemed approved if there are no corrections or additions.

Okay.

So item two, report from the city clerk regarding elections-related charter cleanup and requesting input and direction from the committee.

I welcome Liz Mayland, our well-known and very efficient city clerk, Bonnie Stone, Deputy Director of Elections and Information Services in the Office of the City Clerk.

And I know you have the able assistance of Denise Jenkins, who's my elections analyst.

Denise Jenkins, who's joining us.

So thank you.

I really appreciate this opportunity.

And as you mentioned, I'm here with my wonderful elections team.

We also have Deputy City Attorney Sharon Spivak in the audience, and she is available to answer questions of a legal nature should they arise at the conclusion of the report.

Just to by way of introduction, we were before you on April 24th when we presented a detailed timeline with a variety of elections-related issues.

And at that time we were directed to return today, July 10th to talk about two of those specific issues, and those are the inauguration slash term of office as well as the special election to fill a vacancy.

The first issue that Ms.

Malin referred to regards the term of office and the date that that begins for officeholders that are elected via the regular election process.

Now, two charter provisions come into play here, the first of which requires us to the City of San Diego when having a runoff election because there is no outright winner in the primary election.

We consolidate our runoff elections with the very good.

With the November statewide general election.

Now state law mandates that those elections are held on the first Tuesday of after the first Monday of November in even numbered years.

The second relative Charter provision says very specifically that regularly elected officeholders begin their terms of office at 10 a.m.

on the first Monday following the first day of December in the appropriate years.

So we have a November date and we have a December date.

And there is a range of time between those two dates from 27 days to 34 days.

Now in 2014, we're at the longer end of that scale.

There are 34 days between the election date and the inauguration date.

And that's not so much of a problem.

Where we run into some difficulty is when the time frame between November and December is at the shorter end of the range, with 27 days between the election date and the inauguration date.

That's because state law enables the registrar of voters to have as much as 28 days of time to finalize the election results.

Consequently, we could have the formal term of office beginning even before the registrar has completed the final canvas of the election results.

To further make things a little more complicated, there is pending legislation in Sacramento that would extend that 28-day period of time for the registrar of voters to complete the final canvas from 28 days to 30 days.

So you can see that we have some concern there.

Now, again, in 2014, we're going to be at that longer end of the scale, 34 days.

But in 2016 and in 2018, we'll be at the shorter end of the scale with 27 days between the election date and the inauguration date.

The second issue that Ms.

Malin referred to is for those instances where we are electing an officeholder via the special election process.

And again, there is no outright winner in the first election.

The Charter provision there says that we must hold our runoff election within 49 days, unless there is a regularly scheduled local or statewide election scheduled for 90 days from the proposed runoff date.

In that case, we can consolidate with that regularly scheduled election.

Otherwise, the Charter says we have to have our runoff within 49 days.

You've already seen that much of that time can be eaten up by the 28 days the registrar has to perform the final canvas.

Additionally, what's happening in that time frame is that the clerk is docketing her certificate of election results.

Council is adopting those election results and calling the runoff election.

Candidates are providing to the clerk additional materials or amended materials for the voter pamphlet for the runoff election.