Hello:
In a separate post, I announced the following points of discussion for the code reorganization committee and am reposting them here so that anyone who is interested can participate, regardless of time zones.
1) Registering interested members and contact information.
2) Identifying and quantifying the goals and benchmarks of this committee.
3) Suggestions on criteria for categorizing bills.
4) Suggestions on converting the list from the prior point to a workable list.
5) Thoughts on incorporating sustainability. (Once we've cleaned up the code, how do we keep it that way?)
6) Other thoughts, related information, future meetings if needed.
To start the ball rolling, here are some thoughts I've had on each point.
1) I can always be reached at [email protected]
2) The primary goal of this committee is to make our legislation and government more accessible by removing obsolete bills from our active code of laws. At quick glance, it seems that between a quarter and a third of bills that are listed at http://www.aliasi.us/nburgwiki/tiki-ind ... e+CDS+Code can likely be identified as being obsolete by definitions I've proposed in section 3. The L.R.A. has set a deadline at the end of March for this committee's proposal. As such, it seems that we should have a list of proposed obsolete bills in place by the 16th of March and proposed legislation or R.A. rule changes by the 23rd.
3) The simplest and most effective way of categorizing the bills is to simply designate a given bill as being either active or obsolete (or historic.)
Criteria for determining the current applicability of a given piece of legislation should include:
a) Does the legislation address a specific project or situation that has since been resolved?
b) Has the legislation been encompassed, replaced, or repealed by more recent legislation?
c) Does the legislation permit or promote activities that have since been prohibited by LL actions?
4) In terms of actual organization of the list of CDS code, the most important objective is to separate the obsolete code from the active code. I have come up with two different schemes:
a) One page; active code, horizontal divider, historic code. - This would keep all of our code on one easily accessible page, which would facilitate research and examination of our history, as our code can tell a pretty accurate story of our community. There would be a horizontal divider, large headers and introductory text explaining the significance of the historic code.
b) Two pages; one for active code, the other for historic - This would prevent any confusion regarding which codes are active and which aren't, but could result in interested parties having trouble locating the page of historic code.
5) In order to simplify this process in the future, reduce the need for future commissions on this topic, and continue to keep our code organized, I propose that the R.A. Archivist (or LRA in the absence of an archivist) is to put together a list of bills at the end of each R.A. term that he proposes are obsolete to be considered by the R.A. The Archivist will be required to hold at least one public meeting and seek public comment regarding his proposed list. In addition, the R.A. has the right to add or remove bills to the list with a simple majority vote. However, to approve the list of bills to retire, it requires a 2/3rds vote of the R.A.
I am eager to hear any thoughts that you may have on this. If you are interested in joining the committee, please contact me or check out the following post for future meeting times: http://forums.slcds.info/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=1617.
--BL