Speaker numbers apply only to this recording.
The Rules Committee of the San Leandro City Council met to discuss and provide direction on a proposal to add facilitated discussion mechanisms to the City Council handbook to help resolve disagreements among council members. The committee considered a framework presented by Councilmember Simon and provided specific direction to staff to expand the draft to include a multi-step process. No public comments were received.
Okay, since 9 o'clock, I'm going to order the soundly number of city council rules committee. Today is Wednesday, September 23rd. Madam Clerk, would you please take the role? Council members. Present. Thank you. And Councilmember Bowen is absent and mayor as office. Present. And could we please have your public announcement? After each agenda item is presented, the mayor will ask for a committee under comments and then take public comment. You will have two minutes for your comment. The council title will hear it for the convenience of the speaker and attendees. At this point in time, we will move to our item two, which is our only item today for discussion. And that's uh a discussion to consider facilitated discussion mechanisms to help resolve disagreements for city council members. We've got assistant city manager, Michael Ewan to present the item. Thank you, Mr. Mayor, and good morning committee. As you are aware, this item has been uh in the rules committee before. Um, and after uh a few discussions here was it went back to council on September 8th uh to update council and to also specifically seek authority to explore facilitated discussion mechanisms as a tool for early conflict resolution uh and to propose updates to the city council handbook for that uh purpose. Um so this is a time where staff is here to hear what the committee's discussions are and ultimately what the committee would like to direct the staff to do to uh update the council member handbook accordingly as you see fit um attached to the staff report uh and is also before you on the dice uh is also a handout from council member Simon with a kind of uh proposed framework for uh how such a discussion process uh could be envisioned. Uh so with that we will turn it over to the committee and in await direction from you. Okay, so what we'll do is people a comment on this item and then engage in our discussion. Mayor, we have not received any comment cards on this item. Okay, not having received any public comment cards desires to speak, we will post public comment and come back to committee members for discussion. As a courtesy, I will begin with council member Simon to see if he's got any elaboration elucidation. I do have some questions that we will explore. Councilmember Simon. Uh thank you. And just to reiterate, this is a tool to help us in our tool office if we do have issues that may come up amongst council to efficiently and effectively resolve situations. And I understand the direction is now to include this if we decide to is to include it in the council handbook and uh just looking at different areas in the handbook, particularly where we could be concluded, perhaps near the ethics policy section, either before or after.