Thank you so much to members of the public who reached out via email and who came to tonight’s Council Meeting to share your thoughts on Charter Amendment No. 180 to consider dividing the existing City Resources & Emergency Management Department (CREM) into two departments: the Department of Human Services and the Department of Emergency Management – it is extremely helpful to hear from residents whenever a change like this is being considered for our City.

I wanted to provide a brief recap of the comments I made during tonight’s proceedings in the process of casting my vote:

  • First, I’ve persuaded myself both ways on this Charter Amendment at least a couple times each, because I can see the merits of two sides

  • On the one hand, it’s natural that with the addition of the new Multi-Service Center (MSC) and its role in our City, that resources be strategically aligned to empower it to flourish in its mission

  • On the other hand, adding to our City’s departmental count in order to create a department for something we already created a department for not even a full two years ago when we already anticipated this (i.e., CREM was formed in March 2023 with one of the principal reasons to oversee the MSC) made it harder to grasp

  • The other part for me is also that it’s not so much that Human Services shouldn’t be its own Department (for which I see a lot of solid reasons), but that in this plan, Emergency Management becomes a Department of 2 people all out on its own. And while they are a critical asset for us to have as a City, their function seems better fitted to an Office rather than a Department, perhaps an Office under the Department of the City Administrator where it was before.

  • So it’s not to say that there was nothing favorable in the proposal, but that in its current state, it was difficult to conclude it was a ‘complete enough’ plan to accomplish the stated objective, which is a good one, but I believe would benefit from some additional attention.

In the end, my vote was “Yes”, with an ask of the Mayor to give consideration to folding the Department of Emergency Management into another Department in time to avoid un-needed financial burden on the taxpayers.

As a procedural note, a Charter Amendment cannot take effect until it goes through an extra special process including 40 days of being posted publicly and ensuring no more than 20% of qualified voters sign a petition rejection its adoption.

(Separately, something I’ve been meaning to share with folks that I think many people may not understand about the mission of the Multi-Service Center: The program of the MSC is not actually overseen by the City at all. It’s overseen by a non-City 501c3 non-profit that recruits and monitors other non-profits and government organizations to provide services. In many ways, the City is acting merely as custodian of the building, helping provide a venue through which those organizations can deliver services.)