By Abha Thakkar
Northside Planning Council
The Task Force on Government Structure (TFOGS) held an open house Sept. 24 at Warner Park Community Recreation Center to gather resident feedback on its work to date.
Over the course of three hours, residents came through, enjoyed a taco bar catered by the FEED Bakery Training Program, and responded to questions posed by the task force.
District 18 Alder Rebecca Kemble serves on the task force and described its goals, “TFOGS was organized about a year and half ago to look at the different structures of City government with a view towards how can we improve them to make government more responsive to the people, more democratic and to make it easier for residents to have input into City policy decisions.”
In particular, TFOGS focused on the City’s Boards, Committees and Commissions (BCCs), which are designed to engage residents in formal decision-making processes. The City has almost 100 BCCs with a City staff person assigned to support each one. There are approximately 700 BCC membership positions, of which 126 must be filled by Common Council members and the remaining 574 seats are filled by residents.
Even then, resident representation is disproportionately drawn from Districts 4, 6, 11, 13 and 19, while resident representation from District 1, 7, 9 and 15 is disproportionately low. The Northside includes Districts 12 and 18.
In order to increase racial equity in the BCC processes, TFOGS examined the frequency and time of day of both Council and BCC meetings, with a focus on supporting the engagement of residents who are not able to attend meetings. Currently, the BCC system tends to only engage residents who have the time, resources and knowledge to participate and can feel intimidating due to complicated rules and procedures.
Kemble described the questions the task force grappled with, “What kinds of innovations could we do on participation and engagement that wouldn’t require people to actually show up in person at meetings, what kind of communication strategies could we have to inform our residents of what’s going on and also to collect really great ideas from residents that we could act upon?”
TFOGS also explored the number and nature of Common Council seats. The City currently has 20 Common Council members, but the part-time nature of the position means that residents who need to work full-time to support themselves and their families don’t always have the privilege of serving as Alder. This limits who has the ability to run for office. The task force also explored whether 20 council members can provide effective representation of residents in general and of people of color and those with lower incomes in particular.
The Northside Planning Council has longed served as a conduit between residents and the City on issues of policy and decision-making, and is among the models TFOGS examined for wider implementation. The fundamental questions are how well connected is the City with its residents and how effectively does information flow back and forth between City staff, the Common Council and the residents they serve?
TFOGS will issue its report by the year’s end, along with recommendations for action to the Common Council.