Foster City sets council meeting time deadline

The City Council will now only remove an item from the consent calendar if a discussion is needed, a councilmember wants to vote no or a councilmember needs to not vote on the item because of a conflict of interest.

City staff also encouraged asking questions before the meeting and having staff sometimes suggest how the council may consider framing its debate to bring clarity and direction on the action. It will begin monitoring meeting duration by conducting a council poll at 10 p.m. on whether to continue the meeting to 11 p.m. at the latest. Whatever is left on the agenda at 11 p.m. would be continued to the next available session. The item was a resolution, with options to revisit protocol by the council if not working.

Staff and council will focus efforts on efficiency while still ensuring the work of the community is done. Gehani lauded City Manager Peter Pirnejad for being proactive in opening up more time to go over agenda items with the council and address questions.

“It’s about all of us agreeing that we can do this in a more efficient way,” Gehani said.

The mayor noted the council had been committed to an aggressive policy agenda. It has met extensively over the past year through regular council meetings and study sessions, with gatherings often going past midnight.

“That’s just tough on staff. It’s tough on the council to stay focused for that long, and it becomes a challenge. So it’s something that we wanted to prioritize and just make sure that we refocused on getting the right things done in a timely fashion,” Gehani said.

He believes meeting in person gives the discussions different energy, but improving efficiency will be based on getting questions answered before the meeting. Gehani hopes to see everyone come in ready to discuss the topic instead of asking staff questions to arrive at a conclusion. He is also working on guiding discussions to remain on the agenda topic.

“As a mayor that’s running the meeting, I think it’s important for me to just continually reinforce the importance of engaging with staff and getting questions answered before the meeting so that we are spending time on discussion and voting and less on getting questions answered during the meeting,” Gehani said.

Councilmember Patrick Sullivan noted the difficulties of using Zoom could affect the meeting procedure. He mentioned a Zoom meeting when he made a motion, but it was not caught at the time but was later caught on the meeting recording.

The city also established a Privacy and Technology Policy Ad Hoc Subcommittee. It will discuss measures incorporated in policy to ensure transparency and accountability of information acquired through technology use. The subcommittee will have councilmembers Jon Froomin and Sam Hindi. Subcommittees are composed of one or two members who meet to discuss and provide direction to staff on issues that will appear before the whole body. A special meeting on minimum wage was approved in which Vice Mayor Richa Awasthi, Froomin and Hindi would participate.

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