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Commissioners spend time debating agenda(s)

Debra W. Buehn
Posted 1/25/17

GREEN COVE SPRINGS – Clay County’s Jan. 24 commissioners’ meeting resulted in a dust up over who has what authority and what procedures need to be followed when setting meeting agenda …

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Commissioners spend time debating agenda(s)


Posted

GREEN COVE SPRINGS – Clay County’s Jan. 24 commissioners’ meeting resulted in a dust up over who has what authority and what procedures need to be followed when setting meeting agenda items.

No real action or vote was taken on the topic but the consensus was that any commissioner could put an item on the agenda as long as it was done in a timely fashion and that all commissioners will now receive a review draft of the agenda before it is posted.

The kerfuffle began when commission Vice Chairwoman Diane Hutchings said she wanted to bring up a bit of “housekeeping.” The housekeeping turned out to be that a proclamation she had requested be put on the agenda was denied by Commission Chairman Wayne Bolla.

“If we’re going to put something on the agenda, the staff, which includes our manager, our attorney and our auditor, as well as any commissioner, have always been allowed to put something on the agenda, and just because this last week that didn’t happen for me I wanted to bring it to everyone’s attention to make sure that we decide collectively how we want that to work,” Hutchings said.

While no mention was made at the meeting as to what the proclamation was about, Hutchings said later that it was to recognize National School Choice Week. She also said hundreds of other municipalities had made such a proclamation and that the Clay County commissioners last year had supported it unanimously. She said she had lined up representatives of various types of schools to attend the meeting to receive the proclamation. Up until a vote last fall by the school board, Hutchings had been the board president for St. Johns Classical Charter Academy, a charter school approved as one of the last items under the tenure of former school superintendent Charlie Van Zant Jr. However, by the time the item came up for a vote, Hutchings had resigned the post.

“It was time sensitive,” she said.

For his part, Bolla said he had only heard of the item the night before the Jan. 24 meeting when he got a call from County Manager Stephanie Kopelousos requesting it be added to the agenda. Bolla said he didn’t have time to review it or research it so he said “no.”

“It was a proclamation that kind of committed the board to agreeing to some stuff and I said, well, I can’t research this, I don’t have the time to deal with it, I’m not really in favor of this. Normally, I’ll let the board vote on anything…but I got this at the last minute and so I said no,” Bolla said.

He later added that he believed the commissioners should discuss a proclamation prior to it being delivered.

Kopelousos took the blame for the late notice of the proclamation, saying the staff “dropped the ball” on getting the item on the agenda. Hutchings had requested its placement on Jan. 6 via e-mail.

But Hutchings said her reason for bringing up the subject was not just on an isolated item.

“This particular issue is not what I’m concerned about. My concern is that you would deny any commissioner of putting something on the agenda,” she said to Bolla. “I think that the discussion needs to be that do we, as commissioners, want to grant you that power.”

Commissioner Mike Cella said that although he was new to the board, he had viewed commission meetings for some time and didn’t remember seeing the board vote to put a proclamation on the agenda.

“If there’s a process, then I guess we should know what that process is,” he said.

According to Kopelousos, the agenda is usually put together on the Wednesday before the next Tuesday meeting (the commission typically meets on the second and fourth Tuesday of the month) and the chairman reviews it. It is then usually posted on Thursday so the public has a chance to see if there is an item of interest.

“The way we’ve operated is that if you (a commissioner) want to put something on there, we put it on the agenda,” Kopelousos said.

Bolla, who previously served on the Clay County School Board, said during his years on that board, there was a two-week deadline to have something placed on the agenda.

But the county commissioners said they didn’t see a need to change things that much, and that the system was basically working.

While no vote was taken, the commissioners agreed that, in the future, any items they wanted to see go on the agenda would be presented in a timely manner, and, following a suggestion from Hutchings, each commissioner would receive a draft of the agenda before its posting. That way, they could each ensure that if they had requested an item to be included on the agenda, it was indeed there.

After the meeting, Bolla said he was satisfied with the end result.

“We need to build a little more discipline into the process,” he said. “We’re sorting it out.”