SOUTH PORTLAND – The South Portland City Council, at a workshop meeting Monday, authorized the creation of a new group to review and possibly overhaul the structure of the city’s many volunteer boards and committees, as well as the appointment process used by the council.

Call it the Committee Committee.

“It does seem ironic to create a committee to review committees,” said freshman Councilor Melissa Linscott, who will head the new group, which was not actually given a name.

“I don’t see how you could skin it any other way,” said City Manager Jim Gailey.

The group, to include Town Clerk Susan Mooney, at least one school board member, and an as-yet-undetermined number of members of city committees, was charged with delivering a report back to the council as soon as “early May” and no later than “sometime this summer.”

Although councilors referenced two incidents in the past year – one involving the interjection of several councilors into Planning Board business, and the other a debate over the role of the civil service commission – Mayor Tom Blake said the new review group “came about for no particular reason.”

“It’s just that in my six years on the council I had never seen a time when we have actually oversighted our boards and committees,” he said. “I thought it was a good time for us to take a peak and solicit feedback.”

However, this is not the first time Blake has tried to address perceived shortcomings in the city’s volunteer committees, although Monday’s effort was both less defined and more inclusive that his last attempt, five years ago.

At that time, with just a year on the council under his belt, Blake was “very frustrated,” he said, by the dearth of information available on each committee, a few of which seemed to operate without guidance or oversight from the council. In some cases, he said, certain committees seemed to flounder without a clear direction or purpose. Convincing residents to serve on the committees was sometimes difficult, he said, because it was not always easy to explain exactly what each committee was supposed to do.

“So, I came in with a 10-point plan about how we could fix the boards and committees,” said Blake. “The problem was, it was a 10-point plan. No councilor or politician should ever come in with a 10-point plan. It was doomed from the get-go.

“But, if we had taken one or two items at the beginning and if we had worked on those, we could have solved some issues, many of which are remaining to this day,” said Blake.

“Things don’t change much,” he added, making what appeared to be an attempt to resurrect his old plan. “At some point, I could make my 10-point position paper available.”

“Or not,” joked Councilor Linda Cohen.

Although Blake references “17 areas of concern,” most of what will come out of the oversight committee will likely amount to “some tweaking,” he said. A common theme expressed by councilors Monday was concern with the appointment process, and some form of a standing appointments committee, suggested by Mooney, could emerge. Apart from that, there should be “no major pole vaults,” said Blake, other than to tackle a suggestion made by Councilor Jerry Jalbert to strip the Civil Service Commission of its role in hiring police officers and firefighters.

Jalbert pointed out that the commission is a somewhat archaic device, created in the early 20th century to root out nepotism from the city’s public safety departments.

“I think we still need a civil service commission to deal with disciplinary issues, but I question whether it should continue on with the hiring and promotion process,” said Jalbert. “In most communities, civil service commissions have become defunct. With modern HR [human resources] rules and modern labor laws, whether it be federal or state, things have changed a lot.”

Today, said Jalbert, there seems little danger of the fire or police departments becoming overrun with the nephews, uncles and sons-in-law of the city manager. Instead, said Jalbert, the continued reliance on the commission could be seen as a process that “undermines the authority” of the manager and his department heads.

Blake noted that pruning the commission of its responsibilities has been tried before, without success. Being a “tough nut,” that particular project may get spun out as something the council will deal with separately from the recommendations of the new committee, he said.

Blake also pointed out that the council has a workshop tentatively scheduled for April 22 with City Attorney Sally Daggett to review its standing rules and the possible creation of a formal code of ethics. That meeting will lay out how the councilors, individually or as a group, may communicate with members of the various boards and committees.

That removes one item from the review list for the new committee, although Mooney said that in a recent survey of city appointees, the one trend was “a request for some communication and guidance from the council.”

“There was a desire in two or three comments for ensuring that the direction that some of these particular boards and committees are going in is in line with what the council is desiring,” said Mooney.

“If you get people on these boards who are worth appointing, you are going to get differences of opinion and different dynamics, some of which we’ve seen in this past year,” said Planning Board member William Laidley, the lone appointee to attend Monday’s workshop, although the council had 13 pages of compiled survey comments to work from.

“Some people don’t like the apparent possibility of contradiction between the boards and the council,” said Laidley. “I think if there is a healthy dialogue, putting personalities to the side, I don’t see why there shouldn’t be ongoing communication between the boards and the council.”

Some of those communication issues may resolve themselves, said Blake, pointing to a new city website which Mooney predicted will come online “in the next couple of months.” The new website should include information to better define the roles and responsibilities of each council-appointed board or committee, something Linscott said is needed to aid recruitment. Blake said the new site also would help “provide adequate support” to the committees.

However, Cohen said the city also must reach out on social media, such as Facebook and Twitter.

“We need some younger people to start coming in and that’s where you’re going to find them,” she said. “Many people don’t even know these boards and committees even exist.”

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