Adler plan would limit some questions

At Monday’s budget work session, Mayor Steve Adler proposed to streamline how many questions City Council presents to city budget staff just before the budget is adopted. He said the idea was to “make the process a little bit more deliberative and reduce the screaming and running about on the day that we’re trying to adopt the budget.” For now, each Council member will be able to direct individual questions under the Q&A format. However, starting next week, it will take two Council members to submit a question, and the following week it will take three. That assumes that the mayor’s colleagues go along with him on the plan. Most seemed sympathetic to the idea at Monday’s meeting after a lengthy discussion about what it meant. The mayor added, “We’re going to adopt the budget on Sept. 8, but my hope is on Sept. 1 we’ll be pretty close in terms of narrowing the issues to be finally decided on the 8th. And to do that, the staff has asked us that we not have 11 people sending them out to cost out multiple scenarios.”