Hamilton County commissioners receive hundreds of pages of information about the biweekly votes they’re asked to take on their constituents’ behalf. Sometimes, that information comes to them the day before a meeting.
That happened this week, Commission Chair Jeff Eversole, R-Ooltewah, said from the dais Wednesday. The commission’s agenda was available Monday morning, in line with state requirements for notifying the public about upcoming meeting topics. But the attachments that come with the agenda — including reports, contracts and tax forms — weren’t available until Tuesday, he said.
Commissioners didn’t vote on any proposals this week. They typically consider official requests one week and take action on them the next, with one agenda for both meetings. Including attachments, the publicly available agenda for the commission’s next meeting — where the panel is scheduled to vote on thousands of dollars of spending and a plan for the county’s next property reappraisal cycle — is 465 pages long.
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Eversole said he hoped the county mayor’s office, which posts the agenda on the county website ahead of commission meetings, would start sending out the attachments that go along with the agenda a little further in advance.
“When we get it on Tuesday, it really makes it difficult for those that have a full-time employment job to look within the short time frame to look at that,” Eversole said Wednesday. “This board needs the quality of time to look at that, review that four, five, six, 700 pages that follow behind it, so they can be prepared on Wednesday. I want this board to be ready.
“That’s a lot of pages to research in just a couple hours, if they’re researching,” he said.
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And in the past, Eversole said, he and the commission’s legislative administrator, Patricia Mitchell, received draft resolutions from the county mayor’s office on Fridays, before the commission’s Wednesday meeting. Knowing what other commissioners were considering was often helpful, he said. And if proposals were missing, he said, having days to contact a commissioner about the missing item could mean that the commission might still have a chance to discuss it soon.
But that practice has stopped, he said. He asked why it ended and requested that the mayor’s office restart it.
County Chief Operating Officer David Roddy said in response that he was unsure why the mayor’s office stopped circulating the draft agenda on Fridays but that he would ask about it. He said he was reluctant to promise that the commission could get drafts on Fridays without knowing why the practice was discontinued.
Reached for a comment on the timeline for distributing information to the commission, County Mayor Weston Wamp’s press secretary, Haley Burton, noted in a text message that state law requires that agendas be posted 48 hours ahead of a meeting.
Contact Mariah Franklin at mfranklin@timesfreepress.com or 423-757-6354.