Agenda Question

I have a question.

The Citrus County Commission meeting agenda is posted on Tuesday afternoons, generally before 5pm the week before the meeting. This was done yesterday, although it came late, closer to 630pm when I saw it pop up.

The county has administrative regulations on how items are added to the agenda. They can be found here if you wish to take a gander.

This talks about the process of staff getting things added to the agenda as well as commissioners. The administrator/staff deadline is 10 days prior to the next meeting. So in the case of next week's meeting, all agenda items from staff/administrator were due on Tuesday, April 14th.

Commissioner have until the 9am Friday of that same week (this would have been the 17th) to get their items submitted to be added to the agenda. Things can be added late if "they are of an emergency nature, cannot wait for action until the following Board meeting, or are deemed of sufficient importance by the County Administrator or County Attorney to warrant immediate Board review."

Often, items are added to the agenda late or additional information is included late. For example, for the March 31st meeting, Sheriff Vincent wanted to talk about the recent arrests of CoreCivic employees, so they added an agenda item on March 30th to allow him to do that.

That would appear to be something of sufficient importance to be added to the agenda for immediate review.

However, we have seen recently items being added to the agenda that do not have complete information.

For instance, at that same meeting, staff included an agenda item for a bid for mowing and landscaping services. That was scheduled as item E.1.c. to be discussed by the board and approved/denied as they choose. That was included in the agenda packet that was published on March 24th.

Well an email comes out March 30th adding additional information to that. Staff added 4 more pages to the document, which included the agreement and the bid tabulation.

Why was that not included on the March 24th agenda item?

The same thing happened with Item I.2 that day. It was the presentation from Trust for Public Lands. The agenda item was set on March 24th, but no backup material was included. At 8:10am on March 31st, the day of the meeting, we get an email that added the presentation to the item. Prior to that, there was no presentation to review. It was not included in the backup material.

We are seeing that again this week.

The Sheriff has an agenda item for a time certain presentation.

This appears to be a presentation about the jail and the potential of the Sheriff's office to take over the jail, but look... no attachments. I presume there will be slides and whatnot to show different numbers. I am pretty certain the public would like to see these things prior to the meeting so that they can come with questions/concerns if they have any. I presume commissioners would like to have this information, although I am almost certain they will have had private meetings with the Sheriff for him to show them these details. But why not the public?

Why is there no backup material for the item?

The Administrative regulations require backup material to be included. If not, those items cannot be heard.

So why is this on the agenda without any backup material in violation of the Administrative Regulations? Who put this on the agenda? I assume it was the County Administrator that approved it as it does not appear to be something the the County Attorney would have purview over.

Yes, I assume it will come later, maybe as late as Monday/Tuesday as recent precedent seems to allow... and emails will go out to those on the list to receive updates to the agenda... but the general public does not see those. The general public will not even know that this backup material exists because its only available online and will not be updated prior to the meeting most likely.

What is the point in having administrative regulations if we are not going to follow them?

The point here is that NOTHING should be added to the agenda without the appropriate backup, outside of items that commissioners want to present. We need to get away from this... place it on the agenda to "reserve" the space... and then add details later.

Stick to the rules please. Not too much to ask, right?