The Leelanau County Board of Commissioners approved its rules of order and procedures at its yearly organization session on Jan. 3, but with the understanding that Article V Committees would see some signifi cant changes in the following weeks. The board will consider adopting new rules limiting committees’ authority at their first regular session of the year Tuesday.
When the county’s fifth finance director, Sean Cowan, announced that he was resigning on Sept. 21, the board made some changes in the hopes of retaining him, including establishing a finance committee chaired by commissioner Doug Rexroat to provide “guidance, role support, and engagement” to Cowan.
Soon afterwards, in early October, a personnel committee chaired by commissioner Kama Ross was established to follow up on county staff members’ recommendation to hire a third party to conduct a climate/culture survey.
Although these changes were not enough to keep Cowan around for much more than another month, these committees continued meeting over late 2023 and generally focused on addressing the underlying issues that led Cowan and his predecessor Jared Prince to leave, both just a few months after they started working for the county.
In the months that followed, the committees drew criticism from some board members. Both the personnel and finance committees consist of just three board members, with no overlap between the two committees. The committees’ recommendations required final approval from the full board, but commissioners said they felt out of the loop on many occasions.
“We introduced (the committees) because we neglected planning for the finance department and we had a lot of catch-up work to do, including background work and discussion in both finance and HR,” board chairman Ty Wessell explained to the newspaper. “I believe the committee structure works well for that, but we erred in giving committees too much authority.”
Rexroat emailed some of his thoughts to the other board members two days prior to the meeting and read the message aloud at the organizational session. Rexroat said that although he supported using committees and believes they can be effective, he thinks there need to be some guidelines to help maintain board’s integrity.
Rexroat’s guidelines were that the board should direct committees to complete “specific, well described tasks” by approving motions at their monthly regular meetings. For example, he said that the board could authorize the building and grounds committee to research possible alternatives to the heating, ventilation, and cooling system – another longstanding problem at the government center.
After receiving directions from the board, the committee will meet and come up with recommendations. Rexroat clearly stated in his email that these recommendations must go to executive sessions for deliberation a week before it is considered for action at their regular meeting.
The county board notably did not follow this procedure when they approved the personnel committee’s recommendation to hire the Michigan Leadership Institute (MLI) to conduct its recent climate/culture survey at a Nov. 9 special meeting. This was partly at the urging of MLI regional president John Scholten so he could begin interviewing employees as soon as possible and present the results in early January.
The board approved signing the contract by a 6-1 vote, with commissioner Melinda Lautner voting “no” in part because she felt the board should discuss it at their executive meeting before action at their Nov. 21 session because that would allow a week for public input.
Rexroat supported a motion by Lautner to remove the personnel committee’s recommendation from the special session agenda, but after this motion failed by a 5-2 vote and the MLI contract was put to a vote, Rexroat supported the survey.
“I fully support the implementation of this (survey); my objection was to the process and form. As much as I would have liked to have seen it gone through executive committee, I do respect the timing function, although I voted against putting it on the agenda,” Rexroat said back in November.
Rexroat’s guidelines are intended to prevent similar occurrences, and he states elsewhere in his email that “all committee research starts at the executive (session), is authorized at the regular, and returns to the executive.”
The amended rules also incorporate Rexroat’s suggestion that, if a committee’s recommendation impacts another committee’s current task, that committee needs to have a chance to meet and review the recommendation before the executive session.
“If the personnel committee has been given a specific task to review, and that task has financial implications, it would not need to be run by the finance committee unless it impacts a specific task already given to the finance committee, and vice versa,” Rexroat said.
The board approved sending the amended rules and procedures to the Jan. 16 regular session at yesterday’s meeting.
