Here are the notes that former 14-year member of the McHenry County Board Ersel Schuster took while listening to the early December meeting of the Committee on Committees:

12/4/18 – Ad Hoc Cmte.

Kate [Bates], Carolyn [Schofield], mike [Skala], paula [Yensen], (Michele [Aavang] missing)

New Business. –

JF [Jack Franks] – as you know, I sent out, 2 weeks ago, the proposed board rules changes

JF – I had gotten a lot of good ideas…. I very much appreciated.

Structure of 6 but others had some very good ideas which we will bring forward…

I’ll ask Mr. Skala about those ideas for the proposed committee consolidation.

Let me say… my background and my reason for the consolidation is simple… greater efficiency for the county board… decreased by 25%… and also cost savings …

We don’t need the amount of committees…

we used to have almost a dozen… and that is a through back to when the CB chair was elected by the board… where the members would support the chair for chairmanships…

If you go further back, where a… the CB mbrs were paid a per diem rather than a salary… there were a lot more committees which meant more trips and then more pay.

Certainly not anything to do with efficiency.

Our proposed consolidation as so many advantages…

1 is fewer trips to the county… less /??? To the administration bldg…. which is savings for you… but, it increases productivity among our dept heads because they will have less time sitting before committees… board meetings as well.

3rd , and most important, it increases our efficiency.

Fewer committees with more members means… for most of these.

The majority of CB mbrs will come into COW already well versed on the resolutions before us.

And Michael… knows what is going on before they even get to the COW… it is a big transparency
at issue.

Ah… we’ve done some other changes in the last year which I know initially met with some regret… ??

you know too much too soon… but we’ve done some good changes which as you will see when we switched to the COW structure … and I think it has worked out really well.

We went to electronic voting… ah.. we also went to videoing our meetings… so it is live… we also improved audio of all the committee meetings… so… I think we’ve done a really good job on that…

I think you will see these proposals take a scalpel to the committee structure and not a hatchet.

Also, I think it is good to have 4 years to acclimate to a committee structure makes more sense.

I think it will be good for continuity… in reducing our size.

So, I am going to ask Mike, our vice chairman to talk about the changes to the 6 cmtes with 8 members each… but there was a new makeup about how we wanted to combine

Skala: Ah… what did you want me to talk about?

JF:

MS: Ah… what you had originally proposed… I was not a big fan of so I proposed… ah there was, I think, a compromise…

In regard to what the combination of what the committees should be… it was basically taking Liq and putting it in with Law and Gov… HR & ISF was also…?

Two years ago we had talked about putting Liq in L&G but at the time we already had the cmtes set up so we decided not to do it at that time.

At the time Jack was wanting to get down to 6 cmtes… then if we wanted to get down to 6 cmtes seemed like a logical solution to that…

PY: What were the other chges? (Mike – HR & ISF)

My concern is… who is going to do the review of the Administrator? There needs to be some checks and balance.

JF: There is no change.

MS: That function wouldn’t go away. All the HR and ISF responsibilities would be in the new cmte.

JF: The idea of the 6 cmtes… means that everyone would get 2 cmtes.

You would see much more of what is going on but it would also provide better “expertise” because we have to have people from
each district…

now we don’t need to base this on where people live but on their expertise and knowledge and gives us a lot more flexibility.

Does that make sense?

PY: Ya.

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More tomorrow.