In one fell swoop, members of the City of Brownsville Commission will be asked to approve and authorize the creation of three committees which will take a direct hand in performing audit and oversight of city departments and entities, oversee the budget process and take hand in formulating the city agenda.
The items are for consideration and action in the meeting to be held Tuesday, July 11, 2017, at 6:00 P.M. in the Commission Chambers, on the Second Floor of the Brownsville City Hall – Old Federal Building, located at 1001 East Elizabeth Street.
Most of those functions had been left up to city bureaucrats, but with the approval of these committees, that function will now be overseen and scrutinized by the new committees that will be appointed if passed.
City commissioners have often complained that by the time items arrived before them at city meetings, the proposed agenda items were a fait accompli, with little wiggle room for other options. With the creation of the new committees, the commission will now take a direct hand in scrutinizing the processes that lead to decisions by the city commission.
It is not unusual for department heads and administrators to push for their proposals claiming that the matters before the commissioners are of an urgent nature and cannot be delayed due to time constraints or other considerations.
It will be interesting to see whether the city administration and department heads will chafe under the new scrutiny and whether the committees will enforce the authority to question bureaucratic decisions on their operations, the budget, and the setting of the agenda for commission decisions.