Departmental Budget Review on 4/12

[Steve Adler]

Council:

On Wednesday of next week, 4/12, we have the departmental budget review for four departments:

-Neighborhood Housing
-Planning
-Development Services
-Municipal Court

How would we like to handle this in the designated three hour period?

We could allot 45 minutes per department and have short presentations by each followed by Q&A (15 minutes for presentation and 30 minutes for Q&A).

We could also ask departments to submit handouts and make no presentations, allowing for 45 minutes of Q&A.

Either way, each Council Member could be afforded the chance to ask a couple questions, then move to the next Council Member, until we’ve all had a chance to ask a question, before anyone gets to ask more than their first couple questions.

What do you think?

s

[Jimmy Flannigan]

It might be worth a test to just go right to Q&A. 4 departments over 3 hours seems like a challenge based on previous work sessions! We can use this opportunity to see how effective it is to skip the presentations. I'm comfortable with asking just a few questions round-robin as well... the difficulty is if that's too structured for the natural back/forth of some topics. For example, if one CM asks an important question and I have a follow up to staff's answer, it might be better to cover it at that moment rather than wait for my turn around the dais.