Meeting of the legislative rules committee, the board of representatives as of 603 p.m.

March 24th, 2026.

Uh, and I note that I see representatives blank, oudreau, camparelli, hughes, hyatt, lapine, myself, Stone, and Weinberg in attendance, as well as President Shaw.

I believe that is it.

Representatives of the board.

If there are any other representatives of the board that are present that I haven't called attention to, please, of course, let your soul be known.

Chair McEwen.

Yes.

Uh, can you make rep Walston a participant?

All right, thank you.

And Rep Walston.

I'm in.

Hello.

All righty.

So at this time it seems that we have all voting members of the committee in attendance, so I declare we do a quorum.

And we're proceed with the first item on the agenda, which is LR 32.016, an ordinance for publication to repeal the appointments commission for Article 17 of chapter six, including section six dash one two one through six-124 of the code of ordinance submitted by Mayor Caroline Simmons.

Uh, and in attendance, we also have uh several invitees, including Chief Fox.

Hello and welcome.

Uh turn to be pronounced that correctly.

I'm sorry, I didn't hear you.

Gars, did I pronounce that correctly?

Yes, that's correct.

Thank you very much.

Um, and so with that, um, before I kind of open the floor, um would any of our invitees Chief Fox, you want to sure.

Um, so we do have a presentation that I put together, and maybe Barbara might be able to share that on the screen or probably supposed to be.

Sure.

So while that's being brought up, um, thank you all for taking the time to review this item.

I'm joined by attorney Lee, who's here to help answer any of the legal questions that come up as it relates to the charter.

But perfect.

Here is our presentation.

Yep.

Oh, can you beat me to it?

Perfect.

So the first slide is really an overview of how the commission was created and when the commission was created.

And I'll share that initially when this was created in 2021, it was designed to facilitate and clarify the appointments process with the goal of addressing a high number of vacancies and higher and expired seats, as well as doing everything that the city could residents who were either unaffiliated or independent voters and not attached to either the two major political parties.

So it was designed to be a nine-member body and consists of seven members appointed by the mayor and confirmed by the board of reps and two voting members from the board of representatives.

So this next slide is an overview of the reality.

So the commission was created before our time, I think with a worthy intent of doing the of achieving the goals that I just laid out.

However, in practice, it was a more challenging task for members of the commission to do what the commission was set out to do.

So this chart breaks down in the month of in the year of 2025, the attendance rates and the inability essentially um, in many cases to get a quorum at the actual appointments commission.

And it was of course our priority when we came in to fill expired seats and vacancies, which we have had success in doing since we started four plus years ago.

So ultimately, the decision to repeal this commission is a result of in practice.

The commission was adding a bureaucratic layer that wasn't assisting with the expedition of filling seats.

Next slide, please.

Thank you.

So this slide is really an overview of what's taken place since we started.

So since December 2021, when we started, our administration has appointed with, of course, the appointee authority of the Board of Reps, 186 residents to boards and commission.

As in terms of demographic breakdown, 68% have been men, 31% have been women.

Close to half of those have been Democrats, while 34% have been Republican, and 15% have represented either unaffiliated or an independent working party, whatever they a person identifies as.

So we are in the process of filling the 43 terms that were expired.

We have 33, 43 terms expired as of last fall winter.

So we're in the process of working through that.

And then I added this anecdote around the number of registered voters in the city of Stanford.

There are 76,000, over 76,000 registered voters, and that breaks down with Democrats representing 42% of those registered voters, Republicans 19%, and unaffiliated 37%.

So you can see the breakdown of how voters are registering within the city.

That's as data as recently as this week.

So for the next slide, the appointments commission.

This breaks down a lot of information around how we've tried to recruit new people into the process since we took office.

So one of the ways we've done that, and again, this was in conjunction with the board of reps, but we did modernize the actual portal that residents were using to apply to boards and commissions.

So we now have an opportunity.