Until recently I was the chair of a commission in the city where I lived for the past eight years. While not like Mercer Island, we "hacked" our commission to extend the organizational capacity of our transportation department, not by putting paid staff on the rolls (although I am a planner by trade), but by broadly interpreting our bylaws to enable the commission to support staff in research, grant writing, and engagement tasks -- effectively outsourcing small tasks to the commission. It worked well -- the town landed a RAISE Grant, several small bike and pedestrian improvement grants, and leveraged other community partnerships into significantly increasing bike rack installations downtown.
I think there's lessons to be drawn from the comparative analysis between these two examples:
(1) Town planning staffs are overworked, understaffed, and need support for needs relative to capacity.
(2) Ad hoc commissions can do much more than complain about problems, but can be actively engaged in identifying solutions and policy implementation if given the chance.
(3) To achieve (2), commissions need more than just a "now taking volunteers" approach to participation, but professionalizing the commission isn't the solution. Curating community involvement to match interest, ability, and specialization with commission purpose and municipal need.
I like your story. My example involved a questionable interpretation of traditional enabling law as applied in Washington State to essentially professionalize a volunteer commission with salaried people from outside of the city.. The realpolitik is that the council did not enjoy some of the positions that the planning commission was taking, nor did staff enjoy the extra work that the volunteers were creating. The hack term was purposefully chosen given the tendency of tech oriented people in the Puget Sound area to apply systems approaches that key on disruption without regard to legal precedent. I say this as a 34-year-old land used as an environmental law practitioner who returned to the country unexpectedly of a couple of years ago and now off with supposed wisdom. This was a couple of months ago and I’m writing about far more interesting things now.!
Until recently I was the chair of a commission in the city where I lived for the past eight years. While not like Mercer Island, we "hacked" our commission to extend the organizational capacity of our transportation department, not by putting paid staff on the rolls (although I am a planner by trade), but by broadly interpreting our bylaws to enable the commission to support staff in research, grant writing, and engagement tasks -- effectively outsourcing small tasks to the commission. It worked well -- the town landed a RAISE Grant, several small bike and pedestrian improvement grants, and leveraged other community partnerships into significantly increasing bike rack installations downtown.
I think there's lessons to be drawn from the comparative analysis between these two examples:
(1) Town planning staffs are overworked, understaffed, and need support for needs relative to capacity.
(2) Ad hoc commissions can do much more than complain about problems, but can be actively engaged in identifying solutions and policy implementation if given the chance.
(3) To achieve (2), commissions need more than just a "now taking volunteers" approach to participation, but professionalizing the commission isn't the solution. Curating community involvement to match interest, ability, and specialization with commission purpose and municipal need.
I like your story. My example involved a questionable interpretation of traditional enabling law as applied in Washington State to essentially professionalize a volunteer commission with salaried people from outside of the city.. The realpolitik is that the council did not enjoy some of the positions that the planning commission was taking, nor did staff enjoy the extra work that the volunteers were creating. The hack term was purposefully chosen given the tendency of tech oriented people in the Puget Sound area to apply systems approaches that key on disruption without regard to legal precedent. I say this as a 34-year-old land used as an environmental law practitioner who returned to the country unexpectedly of a couple of years ago and now off with supposed wisdom. This was a couple of months ago and I’m writing about far more interesting things now.!
Also, always fun to see a fellow recovering lawyer in the planning/administration space!