(FREMONT, CA.) – During their final meeting on Apr. 27, Fremont’s Charter Advisory Committee has many questions regarding the list of recommendations they are meant to finalize during this meeting.
With an overview of all their recommendations covered in a separate article, the committee’s clarifying questions and final comments revolve mostly around the city council’s hiring authority and compensation.
Committee member Dharminder Dewan kicks off the meeting by inquiring about how exactly the hiring process of city staff would work.
He is asking this question under the assumption that the city council accepts the committee’s recommendation to allow the council confirmatory authority over candidates for city staff.
Taking charge of the question, City Attorney Rafael Alvarado explains the potential hiring process step by step.
First, the city manager and supporting staff handles the recruitment and interviewing of candidates.
Based on these interviews and their applications, the city manager will choose their preferred candidate, or their top three if directed by the city council.
Once these candidates are presented to the city council, they can choose to discuss them in a closed session, but no candidates may be hired until the council confirms them in a public session.
He particularly stresses this final step.
“It’s not final until it happens in public. Even if the city council earlier gave an indication about a preference.”
Photo Credit: https://fremontca.viebit.com/watch?hash=25HakgNdbrRMEDt8 / Rafael Alvarado
After learning that confirmations must be public, Dewan is concerned about the potential embarrassment of being rejected during a public meeting.
Alvarado goes on to explain that the city council has the ability to direct the city manager to keep the recruitment for new candidates open if the recommended candidates are unsatisfactory.
With the hiring process cleared up, Dewan begins the discussion of increasing the city council’s salaries by citing a limitation that Alvarado brought up multiple times regarding this topic.
This limitation applies to the Health Benefit Allowance (HBA) received by the council.
The committee had previously almost unanimously decided to match the council’s HBA to that of the city’s full-time employees while maintaining their part-time status.
This, Alvarado had explained, is prohibited in both general law and charter cities, as part-time employees may only receive the amount of HBA that applies to part-time workers.
He also explained, however, that the committee can recommend changes to the base salary of the council rather than the HBA.
Despite this limitation, the committee never changed their recommendation to increase the council’s HBA.
Dewan does not seem to be aware of this, as he asks whether the recommendation was to increase the council's base salary or not.
Alvarado simply reiterates the limitation he’s explained multiple times before, and the topic is quickly covered up; then, the committee begins expressing the opinions they have that are not addressed by the current recommendations.
Committee member Sathya Sankaran is the first to do this, reiterating her reason behind wanting to change Fremont’s government structure to a Strong Mayor rather than maintaining their Council-Manager status.
Because the mayor lives in Fremont, she reasons, they would know the problems of its residents and what goes on within the government, which would allow them to best serve the public.
Photo Credit: https://fremontca.viebit.com/watch?hash=25HakgNdbrRMEDt8 / Sathya Sankaran
Contrary to Sankaran, Dewan has a comment completely unrelated to the recommendations created by the committee.
He references the multitude of student speakers who showed up during previous meetings to advocate for lowering the voting age in school board elections to 16.
“I think [the] city council [...] should definitely try to consider that, if we can bring the voting age down to 16 for school [board] elections,” he says. “The kids nowadays are very smart and they can [make] all these calls, particularly for something that impacts them directly.”
Photo Credit: https://fremontca.viebit.com/watch?hash=25HakgNdbrRMEDt8 / Dharminder Dewan
Despite these unsatisfied opinions and the impossibility of increasing the city council’s HBA while maintaining their part-time status, there are no adjustments made to the recommendations the committee came to over the course of their previous meetings.
If you have any questions, please email me at madison.v@lead4earth.org or comment below.
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