The council’s vote on the years-long effort to untangle the city’s antiquated and labyrinthine fee system came at its June 25th meeting.
“The papers that are in front of you tonight have been through committees, department heads, administrations – three – administrative officer – three – city solicitor, general code, the entire council for a few years, the finance committee multiple times, which I think has been probably a total of seven members on that finance committee since this process started," said councilor Keith Bona, who chairs the finance committee. “I can't guarantee everything has been caught in the ordinances, because obviously this is going through our entire ordinances trying to find every place there was a fee mentioned, and pulling it out and putting it into the schedule, Appendix D. But I do believe we've had many, many eyes. And the thing is, if we find one down the road, and as there will be changes to the appendix, we will just make those amendments later.”
Bona says that upon successful completion of the project, he will step down from the finance committee at the end of the year.
“These changes with Appendix D should make the fees and fines much easier to locate and change for the end users, departments, councils, administrations going forward, having them all in one location," he said. "I think all that have worked on this over the past few years. It may be nothing to the public as they're not really going to notice it, but it's probably one of the, I believe it's one of the largest changes to our ordinances since I have served, involving more entities than anything I can recall.”
Bona said much of the work involved rearranging the ordinances to better slot with code.
“It's really adding that spreadsheet as another appendix," he explained. "We have other appendix in with our ordinances and this is a spreadsheet that you have seen for a few years. Some of the prices on the fees and fines have changed slightly, very few. And the last main change, which wasn't really changing numbers, but under public safety, we just moved the fines to the bottom instead of having them integrated and mixed with the fees and fines.”
Councilor Andrew Fitch read a communication from council Vice President Ashely Shade, his absent colleague and fellow finance committee member, about the sweeping updates.
“In review of our city fines and fees, the finance committee in agreement with our city solicitor are proposing that we create a separate appendix in our city ordinances to hold all of the dollar amounts of our fines and fees," he said. "This change will solve several issues: First, it allows us to update and change the fines and fees in a fair, easy manner in the future. Second, it lists all the fines and fees together, making it far more accessible for the public. Third, it removes the dollar amounts from the different ordinances sections that that they are currently in and list them all in one convenient location. The attached ordinance will create an Appendix D fine and fee schedule that will be attached to our city ordinances. There are currently eight proposed sections that list fees by department and then non-criminal fines. We can be sure that taking the step will create much more efficient and transparent system for our city going forward.”
Bona’s fellow councilors praised him and the finance committee for finally bringing the ordinance revisions to the endgame.
“This is my third trip around on the seat on council, and this has been going on before I even had been here, and I had sat on public services twice, and we had changed the fees twice, so I'm glad to see this finally come to an end, and thank you for everybody throughout the past three administrations that it's finally going to come to an end,” said Councilor Peter Oleskiewicz.
The council is expected to take a second, final vote on the revisions this month.
