Champaign City Council Study Session 1/28

This post covers a recent Champaign City Council Study Session that focused on the City's appointed boards and commissions. This is a followup to last week's City of Champaign Updates post.

The first part of the meeting had an overview of the City's Comprehensive Annual Financial Report (See What's a CAFR on the County Cheat Sheet here). That video presentation is available here at CGTV and the full report is available here. Excerpt:

In our opinion,based on our audit and the report of other auditors,the financial statements referred to above present fairly, in all material respects, the respective financial position of the governmental activities, the business-type  activities,  the  discretely  presented  component  units,  each  major  fund,  and  the  aggregate remaining  fund  information  of  the City  of  Champaign,  Illinois,  as  of June  30,  2019,  and  the  respective changes in financial position and, where applicable, cash flows thereof for the year then ended in accordance with accounting principles generally accepted in the United States of America.

The video presentation is less than 15 minutes. The CAFR itself can be overwhelming, but it has an introduction that explains what it is, what it's for and the gist of the report. The Study Session CAFR report includes the CAFR, but has an additional introduction and summary for the City Council that may be more easily digestible for laymen than the one in the report itself.

The bulk of the two and a half hour long meeting was dedicated to the overview of the City's appointed boards and commissions (full video here). A great deal of information is available in the Study Session boards report itself here, including an overview of the City's particular boards and commissions (as opposed to those required and regulated by State statute) on pages 3-9 of the report. That information is available under the City of Champaign Cheat Sheet page here as well.

The video presentation didn't rehash the whole report, but it did have some additional explanations on the types of boards and commissions looked at here versus others regulated by State statute. It also explained more thoroughly the power structure and how the boards, staff, and City Council are supposed to interact with one another.

The presentation and council comments overall avoided singling out any one board or subcommittee. The impetus for the overview had previously involved some tensions between some on the City Council and the police review board after it had suggested reforms. More on that at a previous Cheat Sheet post here. At times some of those previous concerns could be heard being alluded to, but probably not noticeably unless one was aware of the background.

A few highlights with video links:

• Public participation started out with a lot of input from the Historic Preservation Commission at about the 56 minute mark.
• The public participation also included the chair and a couple police review board members starting around the 1:06 mark.
• Council comments on possible changes, reforms, and concerns began around the 1:28 mark.

The session ended with City Council direction to staff to go to the various boards and commissions and work up recommendations based on this meeting and their input for a future study session to consider.