08/04/2009 Meeting Minutes - Laserfiche WebLink

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City Council Minutes of 8/4!2009 housing program thanks in large part to Councilwoman Jones and to our Fair Housing Administrator Carole Heyward. They do a really good job with the program. It really has made a difference to our community opening up housing to everyone. Fair housing is a way of addressing a myriad of potential housing problems in the city including foreclosures and vacancies. It's a good program, and we have done well. 5) At the last Council meeting in June, he issued anoff-the-cuff opinion that legislation that was sponsored by an individual could not go forward before Council if that person, in this case being the Mayor, withdrew his sponsorship. His off-the-cuff opinion was wrong. After research, he learned the distinction between the concept of introduction of legislation and the concept of sponsorship. He provided City Council with a formal legal opinion. He would still encourage Council to get some rules on sponsorship as to who can jump onto bills and who can jump off and when and who can control what. Those rules would be beneficial. Nevertheless, there is no support in the law, in our Charter, or in state or federal law for concluding that, once a bill or ordinance is introduced, somehow it cannot go through the legislative process to completion because a sponsor withdraws support. 6) One of our law clerks, Danja Therecka, who has done a great job for the city the last year and a half, took the bar exam in Columbus last week. Hopefully, she did well. Mayor O'Grady commented that he would like to highlight some of the comments that the Law Director made with regard to the appeal of the fire fighter litigation. It was a worthy effort. The collective bargaining agreement is established so that the administration and the fire fighter union have specific structure within which to operate. If either side, the city administration or the fire fighters, choose to operate outside of the collective bargaining agreement, it can be very damaging. And, in fact, it is very wrong. So it was a worthy effort. He thinks a testimony to that worthiness is the fact that the Ohio Municipal League chose to file an amicus brief along with the city to stress their objections to the previous ruling. The ruling is what it is; the Supreme Court made the decision that they made. But it was a worthy effort, and he commends the Law Director and Assistant Law Director O'Malley for their efforts in this regard. Finance Director Copfer: 1) The CAFR has been sitting waiting to be submitted to the state and GFOA since mid June. Our auditors, Ciuni & Panichi, received a notice from the Auditor of State asking the city to obtain a 30 day extension from the GFOA because the AOS could not issue the SAS 70 report on internal controls for the City of Cleveland Division of Water, which our auditors rely on when expressing an opinion for the Sewer Revenue Fund. This has affected numerous municipalities, including those that just buy the meter readings and actually do their own billing. At the end of July, we were asked to obtain another extension for the same reason. She is extremely annoyed by this because last year we were on hold because of the county corruption case that was unfolding, and now we are on hold because of the Cleveland Division of Water's controls. She is told the report should be issued within a week, so she is hopeful this will be a moot point by the end of the month. 2) Jim Dubelko, Amy Arrigi the RITA legal counsel, and she met to discuss the process they should develop to pursue RITA non-responders to the annual subpoena program. The other cities in the Rocky River Court expressed interest in being involved, so the next step is having a meeting with the court, law and finance departments of the various cities, and RITA to develop a streamlined, automated process to serve all the needs. Ideas discussed involved an amnesty program for non- responders to clear a little bit of those who would like to be brought current to reduce the over 2,000 non-responders we in North Olmsted alone had for the last subpoena program. 4