January 23, 2007 Beyond the Minutes
Beyond The Minutes – After-the-fact details on the agendas of council meetings, clarifications of what we were really doing, and my thinking behind votes.
Archive for January, 2007
Community Center Summit
Last night, the councils of Longview and Kelso met together with the Cowlitz County commissioners to discuss a potential community center. Regardless of what people may be saying, no decisions have been made on the center at all. Nothing about siting it or even its’ components have even come close to being resolved, or even formally discussed, for the most part. At Wednesday’s meeting, we simply chose to look at going forward with a survey to find out what the community wants and whether you would support it.
January 2, 2007 Beyond the Minutes
Well, after some of our recent meetings, we deserved this one. We had one agenda item – a closeout of a contract that was easily passed. Our only observers were our Daily News reporter and the minister who gave the invocation prior to the meeting.
The council did discuss the appropriate funding of the building department, and scheduled a workshop to discuss the matter more fully on January 23 at 6:00 PM. We’d like to come up with ideas to increase the turnaround time, capacity, and responsiveness of the building department. Since our community development director has left the city’s service, this could be a good time to consider some structural changes. While personnel management is handled by the city manager, the council is responsible for the budgetary approval process that could allocate funds for another position.
Bottom line – we were out by 8:00. Beats the 10:00 finishes we’ve had lately!
