03-13-2023 City Council Minutes - Laserfiche WebLink

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MINUTES OF THE ORONO CITY COUNCIL MEETING March 13,2023 6:00 o'clock p.m. Benson asked for a correction on the minutes of Feb.27,2023. She said in the second paragraph on page 22 the word"wouldn't"should be changed to"would",stating I believe City Attorney Mattick meant to say would,not wouldn't. After some discussion between the Council and the City Attorney it was agreed that the City Attorney's point was that having the City Council make any changes to its work session schedule rather than staff making the decision would be the gold standard and the change should be made. Benson moved,Johnson seconded,to approve the City Council Meeting Minutes of February 27, 2023 with one correction.VOTE: Ayes 4, Nays 0. 12. WORK SESSION SCHEDULE Benson said she wanted to pull this item to talk about it just a little bit,because this agenda item was added at the Council meeting on February 27 after the closed session.It was not on the agenda at the beginning of the meeting and actually one Council Member was not present for that discussion. But Councilmember Crosby is also not here tonight. I was hoping to be able to have this talked about with all the Council present. It would be helpful,I think,given that this is a change from the way that we've done work sessions in the past,just to have City Administrator Edwards give a brief summary about the change that was discussed that night as related to the agenda of work sessions starting from here on out. Edwards said work sessions are set on the on the official calendar at the beginning of every year, and they're set for 5 pm. on the evening of regular meetings,which start at 6 pm. There have been instances where we do not have anything for an agenda for a work session in the past and we would cancel those meetings.However,in our discussions over the last couple of weeks,we thought the best practice would be for the Council to actually cancel those as opposed to it just being a staff-initiated process. So what you have before you is what I proposed as a re-occurring Council item,which will list out the future agenda items for work sessions. It shows the tentative ones out in the distant future.And then you would address as a Council the next upcoming meeting,in this particular case,the work session of March 21. Normally, on the second work session of March,we do Planning Commissioner interviews if we have any. We do not have anybody available for Planning Commission interviews on the 21 st. So therefore,the staff recommendation is that the Council would cancel the work session for the 21 st.He explained so far the City has one Planning Commission candidate to interview but the individual is not available in March, but would be available in April. Seals noted with the new approach it's also nice to see kind of what's coming. Benson asked if the work session item would be on the consent agenda at each meeting,how Council Members would be able to ask about adding items to the work session agenda and about changing the time of the meeting if it was felt it was not necessary to start at 5 p.m. Edwards said he would normally put it on Consent.And then certainly, if anybody has something they want to add,then it would just be easy enough to pull it off Consent and have a discussion. If a short agenda is anticipated the City Council could decide to start the meeting later,say at 5:30 p.m. Work Page 2 of 21