City Commission postpones decision on moving City Clerk’s office under City Manager’s Office

BY JENNIFER CABRERA

GAINESVILLE, Fla. – Today the Gainesville City Commission discussed moving the City Clerk’s office under the City Manager’s office but postponed the decision to June 15, when they will also name an Interim City Clerk.

The item was placed on today’s agenda after Commissioner Bryan Eastman pointed out at the May 18 City Commission meeting that the City’s Charter does not require the Clerk to be an independent charter officer. The Charter also does not require the City Auditor to be an independent charter officer, but the commission showed no appetite on May 18 to change that office.

In introducing the agenda item, City Manager Cynthia Curry said the goal of incorporating the Clerk’s office into hers would be to streamline administrative functions and more seamlessly address requests from constituents, but it would require a significant transition; she clarified that the office would become a division of her office, not a separate department. The Clerk is currently responsible for providing oversight to her office, managing agendas and meetings, managing public records and record requests, fulfilling commission requests for policy research, and providing administrative support to the Mayor and commissioners; Curry spoke about specific ways these functions could be streamlined by combining them with work already done by the Office of Management and Budget (in the policy area) and Government Affairs & Community Relations and Communications & Marketing (in the constituent services area).

Curry said that if the commission decided to merge the offices, “I would see no need to have a Clerk and a Deputy Clerk” because her office could take over management of the Clerk’s staff; she said that would save about $170,000 in salaries right away and about $30,000 in a search for a permanent Clerk.

Commissioner Reina Saco said she wasn’t against the idea, but she didn’t favor making such a big change “four months before we’re supposed to start a fiscal year… I think I would want a deeper dive into detail, which would require staff time out of the Manager’s office.” Given that the City Manager is busy with budgeting issues, she suggested hiring an Interim Clerk and then making a decision on a permanent replacement after the budget is adopted.

Commissioner Cynthia Chestnut said she liked the proposed operational efficiencies; she suggested adopting the proposal, continuing with the selection of the Interim Clerk as planned on June 15, and then letting the City Manager hire a new permanent Clerk to work in her office.

Commissioner Casey Willits said he was concerned at how fast the change would need to be made, “but I absolutely think that we should talk about this now. Because if this is even a next-fiscal-year idea–because the budget cuts we’re looking at this year feel like a one-time thing, but when we start to have new demands in the next year, but we go back and oh–we were wrong for cutting this, something fell apart that we need to reinvest in, and we’re gonna have to look somewhere else in the organization to find those savings.” Willits said, “I think even by October 1, we will have said we’re going to do something that–oh, we wish we didn’t have to, so that next year we may say, ‘No, no, no, we’ve got to because we need to bring back whatever.'” He said one example of a place they could use savings from eliminating the Clerk’s office could be free bus fares for people under 18 and over 65 years of age.

Commissioner Bryan Eastman said he understood that this would take staff time on top of their current budget work, but “none of us asked for any of those things from staff; it was put upon us by the State of Florida, saying that we need to make cuts, and not just cuts but make them much more rapidly than make sense for any organization, particularly one like government, which needs to be very thoughtful and deliberate about every step it takes.” He said this is the right time to move forward with consolidating the Clerk and City Manager offices and that if it didn’t work, they could always move it back; he proposed moving it for one year and then reevaluating the following year.

Commissioner Desmon Duncan-Walker said that although she had been the one to ask the City Manager to bring them a presentation, she had done some research and was now “not particularly on board with doing this right now.” She said there is value in having the City Clerk be independent from the City Manager while ensuring that the decision-making process is transparent to the public, and she was concerned that the commissioners’ executive assistants might be less available to commissioners if they answered to the City Manager. She said she would need a “deeper dive.”

City Clerk Omichele Nattiel-Williams said she created the Deputy Clerk position about three or four years ago because the demands on her office were growing. She said commissioners might have less access to their executive assistants and the policy research team if those functions were “down a few layers” in the City Manager’s office. She also reminded commissioners that the Clerk’s office manages elections and said it would be “prudent [to look] at this a bit further to see the effects and impacts it would have.” She said the Clerk’s office currently operates on a “lean” budget, and reducing it more would result in a “reduced level of service.”

Commissioner Ed Book said he was trying to balance streamlining and budget versus autonomy and access and “the ability to get information” and added, “I don’t know where to stand on this. I think it’s close.”

Mayor Harvey Ward said the current structure is unbalanced because “we have a commission and six charters.” He said that some charters manage a lot of people and some don’t manage as many people, “and that creates… imbalances that nobody means to create, has nothing to do with the individuals in the positions.” He said if somebody started out to create a system for City government, “I dare say nobody would come up with seven elected officials managing six people who manage 2,400 people, all in public.”

Ward pointed out that this is the time to make the change because they are unlikely to do it when they have a permanent Clerk, and past Clerks have served up to 25 years. He suggested selecting an Interim Clerk and then having a conversation in October, after the budget is adopted, about how they want to move forward. He said they should “probably not think about it in terms of budgetary savings, but rather structural integrity. Does it make more sense to have this position or to roll it into the Manager’s office? I think that’s the right framework.” He asked the Clerk to add an agenda item to the June 15 meeting, “and under that agenda item, we will first decide if we’re going to move forward and then we’ll pick an Interim [Clerk], assuming that we’re going to move forward.”

Human Resources Director Laura Graetz asked whether the commissioners wanted to set up interviews with the candidates for the Interim Clerk job, but Ward said, “I feel like we are all in proximity to the applicants… It’s an Interim, it’s not a permanent choice.” He didn’t want to delay the selection of the Interim Clerk because Nattiel-Williams’ last day is June 30 but said that commissioners could schedule interviews if they wanted to.

Nattiel-Williams pointed out that 15 days would not give her much time to train the Interim Clerk; she recommended “expediting” the decision to a date before June 15, but Ward said there was no way to do that, given their schedules.