Charter: Commission appointment process

[Paul Prince]

In the January 28, 2026 CRC meeting I was asked to create a council discussion thread relating to the CRC discussion on their perceived issues with our existing process for appointing members to boards and commissions.

In summary, our existing process is this:

• Applications for citizen boards/commissions ("boards" in following comments) are due to the city around the time of the annual election.
• At the first council meeting following elections, all liaison assignments are made. The liaison for each board then evaluates applicants and brings in his/her recommendation for who to appoint for all vacant seats at a subsequent council meeting.
• These recommendations are *almost always* approved unanimously (there have been only a few recommendations not receiving unanimous approval and only one that was not approved in my 5 year history on council)

The CRC has expressed the opinion that this places too much authority in one council members hands to sway the makeup of a board or commission. They noted as an example that the recent P&Z makeup includes 5 new seats which were recommended by one council member (in this case, me).

Furthermore, our recent ordinance prohibiting volunteers serving on more than one of the BoA, BSC, and P&Z leads to potential conflicts when more than one liaison wants to appoint the same person to their board.

Various ideas for how to address this have been discussed by the CRC. These include:

1. All boards be appointed in a process of one appointee per council member (This is problematic given that we currently have two year terms on boards, leading to usually having just 3 or 4 seats under consideration)
2. Vote on appointment of individuals per seat rather than as a slate. (This could lead to significantly extending the time needed to make appointments but could allow for better debate on individual concerns)
3. Have the mayor recommend all appointments (this is done in another texas city but the CRC strongly disliked this approach)
4. Have more than one council member, or a council sub-committee, be responsible for reviewing applicants and making appointment recommendations.

I will note that with our current Charter Review Committee we essentially used #4, as council appointed two council members (Mr. Saum and me) and the two of us jointly evaluated applicants and made a recommendation to council for appointment.

My suggestion on this would be to have our three "Commission" liaisons (BoA, BSC, and P&Z) jointly recommend the appointments to those 3 bodies, and have either:

• The remaining 3 council members make all other board appointment recommendations *OR* retain the existing single liaison appointment process for these "advisory" boards.
• The mayor would then not participate, or might retain the responsibility for Youth Advisory Committee (YAC) appointments under the current process

I do think this can be addressed by ordinance rather than putting it in the charter. Although, the CRC members like to point out that Ordinances can be changed at the whim of a new council and putting things in the Charter is a much firmer commitment. So....