Resolution Calling For Merging Of Utilities Committee With Municipal Services Committee Introduced At 02/21/2024 Common Council Meeting

One resolution was submitted during the 02/21/2024 Common Council meeting. Resolution 2-R-24 The Resolution To Consolidate The Utilities Committee With the Municipal Services Committee was written by Alderperson Chad Doran (District 15) and, if passed would eliminate the Utilities Committee and merge it with the Municipal Services Committee.

It would do this based on the reasoning that since 2020, nearly 40% of the Utility Committee meetings have been cancelled due to lack of agenda items and the average meeting length of Utility Committee meetings has been only 11 minutes.

This resolution has been referred to the Mayor’s Office to be placed upon the agenda of the Council organizational meeting after the spring aldermanic election.

I looked at meeting data back to 2019 and it appears to me that over the past 5 years, the Utilities Committee has only met 64% of the time, and of the times that they met, 12% of those meetings were Special Meetings outside of their regularly scheduled times.

However, I looked more closely at the meeting lengths for both the Utilities Committee and the Municipal Services Committee. Although average Utilities Committee meeting length may have been 11 minutes from 2020-2023, in 2023, the average length was 21 minutes, and if those meetings had been combined with the Municipal Services Committee meetings, 7 of the 12 meetings would have run over 60 minutes.