Travis County Commissioners Court
January 10, 2012 (Agenda)
Item 17
Since we have you there, item 17 is to consider and take appropriate action on the recommendations to appoint four voting members and four alternates to the technical advisory committee of the capital area metropolitan planning organization.
>> thank you, judge.
back in November the campo policy board approved the campo technical advisory committee's recommendation to revise the requirements for representation on the technical advisory committee.
the revision included designating one person for each person that's on the policy board.
and so in the case of Austin and Travis County, we have four each on the policy board.
and what this does is identifies the four each that we would place on the technical advisory committee.
I would emphasize that we're not making an assignment of one technical advisory committee member to one policy board member.
all of these folks will represent Travis County.
but I imagine that there will be occasion where there might be a difference of opinion, how to resolve a particular problem that our own folks on the policy board may have.
and during those situations we would assign a technical advisory committee to help that policy board member through whatever that issue is.
and then return to the mode of representing the entire county.
so in your backup you will see a list of eight folks.
we have four primary and four secondary.
one of the positions is currently vacant, that's the public works director, that I vacate add few years ago.
and -- vacated a few years ago.
and if you need to see what the bylaws are, they are also included in the backup.
you can see the markup of those.
we would recommend approval of these representatives for the campo tec.
-- tac.
>> well, appointing these persons doesn't really bother me.
I am bothered by one thing, though, which I think would be precedent setting and it's not good precedent.
but my compromise would be that if we come to a point where this court is not of one opinion and we think that members of the tac from Travis County should be assigned to various points of view, that that matter be brought to the Commissioners' court for action.
I don't think we ought to put staff in a position of making that determination.
I can think of a few issues where the court is divided, but I don't know that it's a good idea to have the county executive of tnr assign staff members to help work through that.
if the matter is brought to the Commissioners' court and we're able to look at it, mull over it, and give direction, I guess I feel a lot better.
I wouldn't think that this would come up more than once or twice a year, but -- however number of times it comes up, whatever, the court would have an opportunity to respond to it.
the other thing is that three of us are on the campo policy board and two are not.
so I think in fairness to them, coming back to the court makes more sense.
that's my view.
>> I don't really have a problem.
I agree with you.
the economy that I would bring up, though, is how do we avoid a rolling quorum in finding out what we have differences of opinions on.
>> we would have to rely on staff, which we would have to do if we didn't have the issue coming back to the court anyway.
I'm hoping we don't get to that point.
and -- I'm just real sensitive to our county attorney because he rides us pretty hard on the rolling quorum issue.
but I do agree that they should represent as a unit Travis County.
but when we do have those differences -- I don't have a problem with it coming back to court.
>> this addresses a specific issue that came up
>> [ inaudible ]?
>> we increased the technical advisory committee that advises campo was increased in number of representatives in order to reflect the composition of the policy board.
in other words, before the change, for example, Travis County had one representative on the technical advisory committee.
and Williamson county had one representative.
but there was a big population difference in what the representation was because we actually had more members, for example, from the Commissioners' court on the policy board.
and then also there was a sense among the policy board members that we would like to see more diverse components of transportation represented and by enlarge ening it to represent one policy board member, having one representative component equal number on the tac and the policy board, that we would broaden the intellectual resources and technical resources on the tac.
and hopefully have better decisions.
it was an adjustment.
what happened was a couple of years ago we decreased the size of the -- we increased the size of the policy board and that affected the way the bylaws were written and the technical advisory committee.
>> we also added additional representation of small communities this time around.
>> and added two other counties to the policy board.
>> I see real value in the additional individuals in Travis County who will be serving on the tac because it's -- the tac had been rather engineer heavy and now there will be a considerable representation from planners as well.
>> one of the 2035 plan focuses centers, and when we are looking at transportation needs we lead neisd to look at other infrastructure needs and adding our planning staff as components of our representation.
it should be very helpful, I would think in fostering the decisions, good recommendations out of the technical advisory committee.
>> well, the decisions made by the tac are important decisions.
because when those recommendations come to the policy board, typically we don't have a couple of hours to discuss each of them.
I mean, we're there with multiple items and the wish to get out of there in a couple of hours, but the tac has pretty long meetings and can have several before reaching recommendations.
so it was real important we had four and it's foreseeable that on occasion we will differ.
and in that case the question is what would these four do?
and in my view it would be appropriate for them to come back to court and get some direction.
>> agreed.
>> I appreciate that.
thank you very much.
>> thank you for all the work you've been doing on tac, even when campo doesn't follow your suggestion.
>> with that I move approval of the slate of four appointees and four alternates recommended by staff.
and with the provision that if there's disagreement among the court on a particular issue, then staff will attempt to identify that difference as soon as possible and bring that issue to the Commissioners' court for consideration and appropriate action.
>> second.
>> any more discussion?
all in favor?
that passes by unanimous vote.
thank you very much.
The Closed Caption log for this Commissioners Court agenda item is provided by Travis County Internet Services. Since this file is derived from the Closed Captions created during live cablecasts, there are occasional spelling and grammatical errors. This Closed Caption log is not an official record the Commissioners Court Meeting and cannot be relied on for official purposes. For official records please contact the County Clerk at (512) 854-4722.
Subscribe for updates