Lakewood Advisory Commission Adds Grassroots Leadership

The Lakewood Advisory Commission (LAC) was established to provide research on local issues to City Council. The questions of “how much research?” and “what for?” came up when City Council voted to update the LAC Ordinance. One resulting change was that the LAC can initiate their own research projects, for a grassroots, bottom-up approach instead of top-down. This change has also resulted in the rise of dual presentations to Council, one from LAC and one from city staff, which is a side effect of removing the top-down approach and a demonstration of who controls the flow of information.

The top-down approach was driven by the need for Council, as elected representatives, to initiate projects, to limit projects to manageable levels, and not to duplicate work that city staff is already doing. There are not many projects the city staff is not already working on. Therefore, the LAC started initiating its own projects. During the April 24 meeting, Council Members stated the need to keep LAC Commissioners occupied because Council had heard of members leaving due to lack of purpose. So the bottom-up approach is driven by the need to satisfy LAC Commissioners. In fact, Commissioners are told when recruited that a perk of joining is that they can work on projects that interest them.

The disparity between these two approaches was on display while discussing the proposed ordinance change and the ramifications may not be fully understood for some time. For example, Council Member Olver asked for the LAC to do more projects, without full Council approval. Mayor Paul replied that would lead to an unsupportable number of projects being done if everyone wanted their own project done. However, that is exactly what happened in the past when individual LAC Commissioners proposed projects. Several projects were done concurrently, driven by individual interests, which also led to Commissioners leaving the LAC due to the appearance of favoritism.

The other result is that when Council approves a project, the LAC and the city staff will both work on a project (see dueling presentations on the use of single-use plastic bags). In fact, the LAC cannot do targeted research because pertinent information related to the city must go through city staff, which the LAC does not have direct access to. Therefore, many projects do not make sense for the LAC to do alone, if at all.

City staff will always be in control of the flow of information and what the ultimate outcome of any project will be. City staff provides a memo on each activity of the LAC, the majority of times recommending that City Council take the recommendations “under consideration”. Action will be up to city staff.

The dialogue between Olver and the other Council Members showed that the established procedures in place for the top-down approach are still valid. However, the process for the bottom-up approach is less regulated and often invalidates the previous top-down approach procedures. The change in ordinance has been in the works for some time, delayed due to turnover in the City Clerk and City Attorney office, the two departments with the most knowledge of the LAC.

Prior to the grassroots, bottom-up approach, if a Lakewood resident wanted Lakewood to research a project, they petitioned City Council and City Council could do a Request for Action wherein Council would vote on lending City support to the project. These projects were rare.

Now a resident can join the LAC and get easily approved since the driving factor is retaining Commissioners. There are no guidelines for turning down a project and a precedent for individuals to do individual research.

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