City commission is a tree that fell in a forest. No one noticed.
City commission is a tree that fell in a forest. No one noticed.
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The City Council is poised to remove the Strategic Planning and Partnerships Commission from the City Charter after a lengthy period of inactivity.
Most city residents didn't realize that the commission was still in the charter. After being reinvigorated around 20 years ago during former Mayor Sam Teresi's administration, and largely driven by Dr. Lillian Ney during her time on the City Council, the commission has fallen back into dormancy.
The commission was largely a group that made non-binding recommendations to the mayor and City Council and worked on special projects that took place outside of the city budget. The commission began to wind down as the Jamestown Renaissance Corporation took on greater importance. That made sense. There were more than a few common board members, and the Renaissance Corporation had dedicated funding streams from local foundations to carry out many of the same discussions as were once taking place at Strategic Planning and Partnerships – but with a greater ability to actually obtain funding for those projects. The only real difference is the Strategic Planning and Partnerships Commission met publicly and kept publicly available minutes, while the non-profit JRC and other such groups operate privately.
The problem is the city charter was changed in the 2000s to give the commission a role in the city budget process that we're not sure ever made any sense. The charter calls on the Strategic Planning and Partnerships Commission to have a role in the city's capital budget process. It's a role that the commission rarely took part in even when it was meeting, so claims that the city has abandoned the commission's charter-prescribed role in recent years are revisionist history at best.
Logically, we see two problems with this advisory role. The first is that except for the city's federal ARPA funding, Jamestown, by and large, doesn't have much of a capital budget. Those projects are largely taken out of the contingency budget at the end of the year when it is evident the funding won't be needed for that year. A city struggling to keep tax increases to manageable levels isn't going to waste a commission's time reviewing capital projects that aren't going to receive city funding anyway. More concerning, though, is taking capital budgeting out of the council's hands in the first place. Why elect a City Council or a mayor if recommendations on capital spending are filtered through a commission filled with unelected members? We elect a City Council for a reason – and it's to make strategic decisions about how to stay ahead of capital spending needs. If we really need a Strategic Planning and Partnerships Commission to be involved in capital spending then we are electing the wrong people to the council and mayor's office.
Members of the City Council's Public Safety Committee tabled a proposal on Monday to remove the commission from the City Charter so they could discuss it further. Those talks should result in the commission's demise. Strategic planning should be a function of the executive and legislative branches. They can bring in whoever they want to help with that function. A separate commission isn't needed – and the fact that the Strategic Planning and Partnerships Commission hasn't met for six years is simply proof of that fact. It is an idea that has outlived its usefulness.
If a tree falls in the forest does it make a sound? The answer is no. The Strategic Planning and Partnerships Commission is a tree that fell in the forest six years ago – and it didn't make a peep.