Consent Agenda..

During all of 2023, every member of the Ottawa County Board was also a member of each committee, if they so wished. In practice, that meant that every committee almost always had a full roster of the eleven commissioners when deliberating on action actions.

As a result, it made a lot of sense to put items that were approved at the committee level on the consent agenda when they moved from committee to the Board agenda. The consent agenda is a tool to take routime items or items that have been previously discussed and deliberated on by all Board members and place them together for a single vote.

In January of 2024, the committee structure was changed so that only five members of the board were placed on a committee. Since the Board consists of eleven members, even a unanimous vote of on item on committee meant that only a minority of commissioners would have had a chance to hear the presentation in the Boardroom, ask questions and most importantly, to weigh in with their vote during the committee process.

At the first meeting of the year, items discussed at committee were placed as action items on the full Board agenda, as has been the Board’s historical practice when committees are of five members. However, at the second meeting of the year, all committee items appeared on the consent agenda. Commissioner Bergman asked to have important items removed and placed on the action item agenda. The same happened at the most recent meeting, and I asked to have important committee items removed from the consent agenda and placed on the action item agenda so that we could have full discussion of these items and have individual votes on them.

It is my hope that going forward all committee items will once again appear on the action agenda and not on the consent agenda. The full Board deserves to hear presentations and weigh in with questions and their vote on these important items, and the public very much deserves this as well.

Note - Simply American makes the false assertion that I did not “read the material in the packet provided or watch the Planning and Policy Committee meeting that the County provides on YouTube”. (https://simplyamerican.com/meeting-highlights-update-on...)

I most certainly had. My point in saying that "I don’t think I should need to watch it online in order to get a presentation" was simply that I reject the idea that items that pass committee should go to the consent agenda and that only way that Commissioners can get information about agenda items then is through watching committee meetings. That would be a severe diminishment of the full Board and the Board process. We as a Board have the right and responsibility to fully examine and deliberate agenda items, and that means on the full Board, as an action item.