HUTCHINSON, Kan. — Hutchinson Human Relations Officer Dave Sotelo told Hutch Post Wednesday that changes to the way the city appoints its unelected boards and commissions will be on the agenda for the next city council meeting Tuesday.
"There are two things that we are recommending, a resolution and then an update to the city council policy number 17, which is the policy that sort of lines out the appointments to boards and commissions," Sotelo said. "One of the main goals of that policy is to increase representation from the community into our city boards and commissions, so we'll recommend some updates on that."
One of the main updates is to make all of those boards whose start dates are not otherwise set by state statute to have terms that start and end at the same time of year, which would be the calendar year.
"The housing commission, the human relations commission, the planning commission, those will have the same end and starting date," Sotelo said. "The policy currently requires city staff to recruit and make announcements on upcoming openings on any board and commission three months prior to the opening."
That would mean that the public would know who all was leaving those commissions and what boards they could serve on in the fall, to start on January 1 of the next year.
"One of the goals of the mayor was that the staff reaches out to community organizations, membership groups, churches, you know, professionals of Reno County and seek candidates and recruit candidates to serve on our boards and commissions. That gets a lot easier when we just do it all at once and say, you know what, in three months, we're going to have ten openings on boards and commissions from the tree board all the way to the planning commission. We are looking for people to serve on those boards."
The number in the quote is a hypothetical, although, it is the intent of Sotelo to ask that any people appointed moving forward only serve on one board or commission at a time. For those serving on multiple boards now, they would let those people finish out their current terms, but then ask them to choose where to serve after that, so that they can have more slots open for more voices. The intent is also to ask voluntarily for demographic information on board and commission members so that Sotelo's office can track those statistics and let the council know what the diversity of those boards looks like on an annual basis. The changes will be part of the Hutchinson City Council agenda Tuesday morning at 9 a.m. at City Hall.