PP&J Blocks Living Wage for Dane Co Jail Inmates

On a vote of 4 – 2 (Paul Rusk, Andy Schauer, Maureen McCarville and Mike Willett voted no on approval. Leland Pan and Dorothy Krause voted yes) the Public Protection and Judiciary decided to let jail inmates continue to get paid $3.50 a DAY for an 8.5 hour shift. Criminal, right? This is from Tuesday night.

Here’s the audio:

The first half hour is the public testimony. There are some questions from the committee.

Paul Rusk asks if the sheriff wants to say anything? He says no.

John Hendrick, Lead Sponsor
Then the chair remembers that the lead Sponsor, John Hendrick still has to speak. Hendrick says that the speakers from the public covered the issues pretty well, but he has a few comments. As members of Dane County, and he knows the sheriff takes this view, that jail inmates are in the custody of the county and we are responsible for them, we need to treat them with justice, not to make them comfortable, but to treat them fairly, that is our responsibility. Paid work in the jail has, in addition to being our responsibility and a moral imperative, it also has many advantages, it will help us to reduce our racial disparities and the idea that someone is in there on a small cash bail and if they were allowed to work they could use that to pay their bail and get out. It should be the next thing we take up as soon as we pass this. There is a demand from the community that 350 people be let out of the jail and obviously it is not that simple, but cash bail and people being held in the jail not for public safety, but because they cannot make their cash bail and return to their hearing that is something we can address and this would do a little bit towards that. The length of the stay in the jail is also a issue of public safety, last year he went to a seminar and one of the evidence based practices he learned was that if someone doesn’t need to be in the jail and you have them in jail for a few days they are more likely to commit a crime when they come out than when they came in. If they are in for a little longer time they are more likely to do crime, this is an national statistic. If there are ways we can ease people out of the jail that don’t need to be there, it would be an improvement for public safety. Obviously people who are sentenced to be there do their time and have a sentence reduction for inmate work. He thinks the thing that has been the biggest stumbling block, because he knows everyone wants to do this (I think that was Johns irony showing through) is how to pay for it. He has a handout that he gave them in the past. The fiscal note is over $800,000 but it should be $900,000, it did not include FICA and social security taxes. He is using the figure of $900,000. He says when people are gainfully employed they can pay their jail fees. That is the first line on the hand out, the jail fees would recoup $217,000 of the $900,000 cost. The county would get that money back. Next if we implement this and we delay the effective date to July 1, that would be half of the cost, or $450,000. You can’t do all these things, it would add up to $2M. The next option is that the living wage is $11.47 and if someone is working in the jail for $11.47 and then get out and can only get a job for $7.25, the minimum wage, then that is a different kind of disparity. So one of the options is to phase in the wage rate. People in the jail wouldn’t go from 40 cents and hour to $11.47 per hour, but to say that they would phase it in and if they start at $7.25 at the minimum wage and next year $8.50 adn the next year $9.50 it would be a long phase in and that would cut the first year by $330,000. So that saves you the great bulk of the $900,000 with those two options. Also in May the information will be coming out and Personnel and Finance will have access to this information but the surplus from the 2014 budget will be determined in May and the amount we estimated that will be put in the reserve, it is not money budgeted to be spent on anything. Next is the laundry contract, they could cancel the current private contract, that number isn’t exactly correct, it is $216,400 is the savings for cancelling the contract, that is money to the general fund and in the operating budget. Since we are cancelling a contract that provides living wage jobs in the private sector and bringing that work into the jail, it makes sense to use the $216,000 to pay the people doing the work. The next line is debt service laundry, the budgeted project is $650,000 to create a laundry facility in the jail, this is a different option, if they cancelled that they would save the debt service in future years. The proposal was to increase that by $209,000 so the total would be $859,000, assuming a 10 year bond that would be $90,000 a year. If you change direction on that, you save $90,000. Finally there is offsetting revenue. People in jail owe money for fine, back child support, and they need money for bail. When someone pays their fine, they pay and we get additional revenue if they can afford the fines, and that is good not just for them not to have that hanging over their head when they get out.

Mike Willett says the annual cost of not putting in the laundry service but that is for equipment, how will they do the laundry if we don’t buy the equipment. Hendrick says it is one or the other. Willett says he thinks he is missing something. Hendrick says right now we budgeted to pay $859,000 to save on the private laundry contract, you can only do one or the other. He says you either pay the contract or build the laundry facility. Willett says you have to have the laundry to pay people to do it. Hendrick says then you would keep the debt service, you wouldn’t cancel that, you would take the savings from the laundry contract. Willett says that money is already gone. They agree they have to ask about that.

Andy Schauer asks about the change to Huber fees, the first suggestion. He is familiar with this because a friend of his is in the jail and he is now currently working at Taco Bell so he is working x amount of hours and then they cut the check to him, take the Huber fees out and that is how that works. Tell me again your suggestion with that in the background and then he will ask his question.

Hendrick says this is not a change in the fees, it is an increase in revenue that will just automatically happen. If someone is gainfully employed, they are paying $23.79 a day in Huber fees, right now we have 25 people who are working in jail, we pay them almost nothing so they are not gainfully employed, so they are not paying the fees. If we pay them, then they will pay the fees. Andy says he now gets it.

Andy Schauer asks how many jobs are available? How many inmates would be able to take part in jobs affected by the wage change. Hendrick says it was 25 shifts per day, 25 inmates each working an 8.5 hour shift. The jail is open 24/7/365 so there are 25 shifts and they are paid very little.

Schauer says the current proposal has no change to the Huber fee part of the ordinances?

Hendrick says he doesn’t think so but can check because in the past the fees only applied to those working outside the jail. Reading the ordinance language it doesn’t look like it has to be clarified. Schauer says that is something they need to look into because Huber seems to him to refer to people working outside. Hendrick says the ordinance refers to someone who is “gainfully employed”

Dorothy Krause says that the jobs are not all laundry, what are they. Hendrick says none of it is laundry, it would be more on the fee services side, he isn’t really certain. They says they have to get that info from the sheriff. The number Hendrick had came from the sheriff’s office. She asks if that is the potential number of employees, Hendrick says they are currently working now. Hendrick says if they cancel the laundry contract, they are not currently working. You can’t do all of these things.

Leland Pan asks if Hendrick has any opinion as to the most fiscally responsible way to do this? Hendrick says he would do a combination of the first ones. Ideally they would go right to $11.47 but he knows that might be asking a lot to do that in one year, phasing of the wage rate would be worth doing to work it out. We have to make sure the laundry contract is funded in the 2015 contract and he believes it is, those funds would be available in 2016. That would be his suggestion, the first 5, some combination of the first 5.

Andy Schuaer asks if they implemented it would they be the only county in the country with it, as far as we know? Hendrick says that he would hesitate to speak for all county jails, but the state facilities are surveyed and that is available on the internet, it would be the case for all state prisons. You might find that San Fransisco might. Schauer says that this is something he will look into more and more as this gets more consideration.

Schauer asks if the wages being earned by the 25 workers, the way we justify it now, he doesn’t want to spend a lot of time justifying the status quo, but if the status quo is shared by the great majority of facilities across the country he says it is fair to talk about that for a second, is that justified by the fact that they are in the facility and the idea of them contributing to the upkeep of the facility, is that the justification for this?

Hendrick says he would hesitate to justify it. He doesn’t want to speak for people who think it is a good idea, it is common.

Sheriff
He says he just want to say that the sheriff does want inmates to be comfortable in the jail, he doesn’t think that was what John meant. Rusk says he didn’t think he meant that either. The sheriff says it is hard to make them comfortable but the alternative is uncomfortable, and that has never been the intent. He says they should also be safe and they are not, but that is a different discussion. Hendrick says he was only talking about people wanting to stay in because the wages are so high. We don’t want to go that far. The sheriff says he may need someone just to accept the applications. He says they need to revisit the fiscal note. FICA wasn’t includes, also if they take on the laundry, there is an addition $200,000 so they are probably closer to $1.2 or 1.3M.

Rusk asks who it would be administered. Right now there are 25 shifts, how would this all be coordinated, will they need more people to figure it all out? Sheriff says the additional staff have not been included in the cost. Rusk asks if that means there won’t be any. Sheriff says no. We’ll wait to let you do your job first and then to implement it will require additional staff. Rusk says he doesn’t want to beat up on anyone but that is the idea behind having a fiscal note, you are supposed to know when we make changes what the real cost is. They didn’t get the FICA in. Sheriff says they can get them an estimate of the number of hours. Rusk says you want to wait tho, until you know what they are going to do. Sheriff says they need to know what they are proposing and then he can figure out the impact.

Willett says that they talked before about the $650,000 for the capital project for the laundry equipment, once they have that they will cancel the outside contract, correct? Sheriff Dave Mahoney says that once they have that and the space, then they will no longer be paying for the outside contract. Willett asks if that will be this year since you have the funding? Sheriff says yes. Willett asks when there will be savings. Sheriff says they are currently paying the outside contract.

Krause asks about staff, the 25 shifts already have appropriate supervision right? Sheriff says they already have that. Will it be similar? Sheriff says there are 25 today and they would be going to over 30. If we are paying someone $11 per hour they will monitor the employees doing their work, going from $3 a day to $11. Krause asks if the monitoring would need to increase for the 5 extra workers for laundry? 5 shifts for laundry? Yes. So you would need to incresae monitoring for the 5, but not the 25? Sheriff says yes, they would have to increase for the 25 too. Krause says but that is work already being done? We would just be paying more? The other staff from the jail says that if they start paying more they will have a higher expectation of the work they do. What they do right now is pretty lose, they have obligations and do different things throughout the day (cleaning supplies go out in the morning and pick them up afterwards, but they are not working a constantly, they might work a half hour and then be in the dorm for a half hour and then do duties for 45 minutes and then back in their dorm. If you are paying them a living wage, the expectations change a little bit (so it would cost less???) So you need supervision, there will be a lot more cleaning and painting if they are employees.

Sheriff says he can think of a lot of other programs that are lax in that that you might want to think about.

Krause would like to investigate the potential.

Schauer says there will be additional bookkeeping.

Hendrick says that as the fiscal note was being prepared the Dept. of Administration thought it through and their assumption is that these would be county employees, instead of a stipend from the sheriff. They would be like a LTE and administered through the county payroll. This is an interesting discussion about how much work gets done now and how much supervision they need, that is all news to him. As far as implementing the wage, he thought it would just be another 25 – 30 people on payroll.

Rusk says it is his understanding that now Deputy Hook, you used the term loose. It is loose and some of it is a behavior thing, you have people that are highly motivated and they are rewarded with things to do thoroughout the day. To move to the laundry, they can build up skills, that will be different. It won’t be so loosey goosey. You will have to keep track of how many hours and who is doing what.

Discussion and Motion and here is where it gets silly.
Starts at 1:04

Rusk says he had a training session and after all these years of being on the county board, and he was told that ideally someone should make a motion (SERIOUSLY!!! What is wrong with people who are chairs of committees that are first learning Robert’s Rules of Order after YEARS of being on the county board – SERIOUSLY – that’s embarrassing. It’s one of the core basics of doing your job!) They have been loosey goosey about having a motion on the floor before going into discussion, so he would entertain a motion.

I think Krause moved approval and Pan seconded, but it could be the other way around.

Schauer says that he appreciates John’s proposal and they have thought through the concerns he raised earlier, his concern now is monetary and the fiscal note that is 10s or 100s of thousands of dollars off. He can’t in good conscience vote until they can have more detail about what they will be doing, what they get and adding the FICA, we should know exactly what this costs and how we will pay for it should be part of the proposal as well and that is now where to be found. He won’t be voting for it in this current format but he is in favor of indefinitely suspending (did he mean indefinite postponement?) so they can keep discussing this in committee.

Pan asks Hendrick if they need to update the fiscal note and could Personnel and Finance just get it if they pass it on? Hendrick says the sheriff has confirmed the two items, the FICA and the additional costs for the laundry, he is not sure if that is a fiscal note on the ordinance amendment but you could include that as an update. The cost in future years if we expand, that could be done at Personnel and Finance and they will likely not be meeting until the 6th.

Willett asks the sheriff if they hire people, they would need to do the I-9 form and that would check their illegal status, does the jail already do that for everyone that is there? And if we don’t, I guess that is the question, start with that. The sheriff says they ask, they don’t confirm. Willett says at $3 a day, but at this point we could be hiring someone who is not legally in the country, he is not criticizing. The sheriff says that immigration status doesn’t impact ability to work. Willett says that it does if the county is hiring them as an employee. Sheriff says currently it doesn’t. Willett says that he doesn’t want to be hiring people who are illegally in the country, shall we say and it would be forcing us to check that status. The sheriff says that is something you could do, but he doesn’t think it is an issue.

Krause says that when people are in prison, there is no hope of working toward productivity and that is an important point that if they can have a real job, she knows they can put prison work on there already, but the pride of having a real job that pays real money and building a real resume is critically important as it goes toward people being more productive citizens. The sheriff said, or what I wrote down was “I want to work too riots” I think there would be a lot of people queuing up to work too, she thinks that is a horrible problem to have, but she would love to have it. She would love to see how many people they could put to work and be productive, she keeps talking about the fact that they have a captive audience in prison and they need to be working towards making them the best possible people as we have them as an audience. She looks on CCAP and sees the fines and this is an excellent to help them pay up on the fines hanging over them and the fines would be coming back to us, so that would be great. She wrote the word renters down, most people don’t know that part of her income is renting rooms in her house and most of the time, since she sees how hard it is to find housing, she tends to rent to those folks, she is in CCAP checking them out to see if she would rent to them or not. There is a lot of benefit in alot of ways. In Fitchburg she keeps talking about attracting jobs for people who have a hard time getting employed and she sees it going towards people’s employ-ability and if they can be working with outside businesses that want to take on more and more inmate workers that we can end up helping get real jobs that would be great. They can pay back fines and child support and help their families while they are incarcerated would be a huge benefit. She knows there are some people who are more comfortable living in jail than out on the streets where they would be otherwise and she feels for all that but to be able to pay bail and get out early is a good thing to make available to folks. (Ugh, she makes me squirm when she talks . . . )

Pan says he would move this on to Personnel and Finance because he thinks the end goal is something he personally thinks morally and ethically that we can’t be for. Some people disagree with this, but he can’t be against that end goal. He thinks if you are working you should be paid a living wage and he doesn’t care how easy or hard that job is or what position you are in, he thinks you should be paid decently. Speakers spoke to why that would benefit community workers. The moral and ethical issues that we don’t pay people significantly in jail (and prisons which we don’t control) he thinks that is a huge issue sand that they are disproportionately affecting people of color only adds to it. For him they can work out the details but should move it forward. He says the sponsor had ideas to pay for it and if they took the first 5 it is over $900,000 and even $1.3M and he thinks the numbers are there and he is ok with Personnel and Finance figuring that out. He says that people should be paid a living wage, if the sheriff determines that it requires more monitoring then workers should be able to unionize. That is a discussion for another day.

Schauer goes back to the economics of this, they can’t let something out of the committee that is this loose on writing a check. To say we want to spend all the county surplus on this and other ways. He would much rather have them but the money towards the mental health facilities outside of the jail, if we spend $900,000 on this then we don’t have that money in the general surplus that we know we have because we have been listening for the last couple months about the deplorable conditions of the jail, one of whom he knows and cares about, he cares about all of them. Its a matter of priorities and we can’t pretend this isn’t real money that we are spending and if we had money to do other issues in regard to mental health facilities and the other things that we are considering then this isn’t where he’d like them to spend $900K or $1.3M.

Rusk calls on himself (1:17) you gave me a very nice lead in, for 4 or 5 months now there have been a series of county board supervisors that have been working very diligently to try and create a system where there are substantial changes not just in the jail but the entire criminal justice system and one of the big key items that we all know about is the tremendous lack of resources spent in the mental health area and we absolutely have to change that and to him that is the moral and ethical problem right there, that we have people in the jail with very challenging mental health and health care issues and they are not being treated properly and they shouldn’t be in the jail in the first place. When they got started on this people kept saying ‘oh no Paul, don’t go in that direction, because we will never come up with the GPR (General Purpose Revenue, to attack all of those problems.” And I said that’s where we are going to act like we are failing before we have even gotten to what we are going to do, so when he sees this nearly $1M that we don’t have he has a very serious problem with it because is seems to him that they should be spending more money so they are not in the jail in the first place. That’s what the problem is. He also, and maybe he is the only one that feels this way, but he has a philosophical problem that some kid working at McDonalds double shift is making $7.25 minimum wage or maybe a little more, $8 an hour and living in poverty and having all kinds of problems and a very challenging life and all that and if you get into the council jail we will pay you $3 an hour more than that and something doesn’t seem. (Audience member Erick Upchruch yells out, you’re right, pay the kids more – lots of talking!) He says they also have a problem in the committee structure, they could pass this on the the committee but we are going to hear form the finance committee because it is not worked out, and fully vetted and the dollar amount is changing and he thinks if they can free up $1M dollars or thereabouts, this is not the area to put it in. The other thing he finds fascinating about all this is you know if we really wanted to provide employment opportunities in the jail, we would let them take over food service. We currently have food service done by union employees (gasp! the horror! 1:21) and it is approximately $1M more because they are organized and they collectively bargained and they got the wages up and they are union employees not in the jail. You could take that money and phase that out as they go into retirement and we could move that money to the jail and we could have the jail taking care of all of the food and it would save the taxpayers a lot of money and provide a lot of jobs in the jail. “Well, we’re certainly not going to do that, are we?” (Wow, gotta listen to the tone and attitude in that!) Organized labor would have a fit, well, we did that, but he couldn’t help point out all that. We also have a disconnect , and maybe this is a little off topic, but we have a disconnect in information that he has seen and the committee has seen about who is in the jail and why they are there and he continually hears someone is stuck in the jail because their bail is $500 or $600 or $350 and if they just had that money they would be out of jail, but when we look at the data, you see that those folks have all kinds of additional issues for why they are in the jail, they have various probation holds and other things on top of the low bail and Todd Mauer just never increased the bail very much. He says they have to look at the whole system and why people are stuck in the jail and very few, if any are only there because they can’t afford to pay the bail and we have a bail fund, the Uber (?) Family Foundation is funding a new bail fund and the last he heard no one has used it to exit from the jail, we had one but then I heard they had funding from the family. He is anxious for someone to use it if we have all these people stuck in the jail because they can’t pay. Now child support came up and its come up a couple times and in April he has the child support administrator pulling together the data and we will get all the data on child support, who goes to jail and the different programs they go through. It will be intriguing to hear, what they do and how many people are stuck in jail. Everything he has heard is few and far between. He doesn’t think it is responsible of them to move this on to the Personnel and Finance committee, its not worked out number one and even if it was worked out he really has a problem with the philosophical of paying someone a living wage which is more than the minimum wage when they are incarcerated in our jail, not matter the reason they are there.

Pan says that as much as there are issues outlined, in that case, he wants something to move forward that is benefiting the community, on one level he wants us to have our end goal to have no one in jail, that is the ideal end goal, we shouldn’t set up a system that is dependent on jail labor to being with. He would sympathize with spending our money elsewhere but they are not in front of him, they haven’t been proposed to show what we can do to lower the incarceration rate and this is the first policy in front of him right now that they can vote on and we are stuck in an either or mentality of we have to do this or that, we can to this ephemeral thing or we can do this policy and he thinks that isn’t true, that is a line of thinking we in government have been stuck with for too long, he thinks some of the points brought up by the community were completely valid, it there is a level of willingness that people shouldn’t not get paid for work, the idea that is is kind of a shitty system (he apologizes for the language) that we incarcerate people who are there against their will and they are not getting paid very well and that population is disproportionately people of color and specifically african americans, he thinks that is a very bad thing, its as fundamental as that. In that case, if people have concerns with implementation, he can sympathize with that, but hen he wants to hear more about is there a potential to reach the end goal and how we would reach the end goal, he is just hearing “well, it will be hard, so we can’t do it”, he thinks that is kinda bogus. He says that indefinite postponement is usually used to kill a resolution, he’s not sure if that is what the person meant and ideally it means they could pull it up to work on it, but we shouldn’t leave it in committee so we don’t vote it down. He would feel more comfortable moving it on with no recommendation, if it is fiscal issues Personnel and Finance can work it out, especially since the lead sponsor is on that committee and he can work it out with hose committee members who we trust. AS the oversight of the criminal justice system, as PP&J, this is a vision that is good, this is one step to make things less inequitable, he thinks it is a reasonable end goal and some of the fiscal stuff is not worked out yet, but he would not to destroy the idea because we are caught up in hows rather than whys.

Maureen McCarville says she echos what Rusk said and her main concerns are the safety of the people in the jail and the fact that we are having trouble with the plumbing, we have to be able to flush toilets, that’s a basic thing. We need to get people out of cells in an emergency, it could be life threatening, we might not have a file but someone could choke or have a heart attack and we are just as responsible, those are immediate very real health and safety standards, we are not in compliance with the Prison Rape Elimination Act and we don’t pass safety checks and we are not there for what the state requires, the layout in the CCB has been outdated for decades and not national standards for years and years, those are immediate health and safety issues that impact everyone, the inmates, regardless of what color they are and why they are there, it affects people who come to visit and the families, it affects the people that work there and we are aware of these problems and they are the most pressing and critical and life threatening. Upchurch says “So let them out” McCarville says “you are not invited to talk during the discussion.” For those reasons, we have this big project in front of us sand until we address serious immediate safety and life concerns and the plumbing, she is not in favor of taking up another fiscal issue.s She is in favor of postponing it, voting it down, whatever we need to do with it, but that is where she is at.

Krause asks when they will hear about child support, is that in April? Rusk says maybe, its a big job, he’ll let them know.

Krause asks Hendrick if Personnel and Finance wants the finance to be worked out before it goes to them or would they be willing to take it over. Hendrick says he can’t speak for the committee, and that they did pass the jail resolution on without it being fully baked. So if this is equally important, it seems like that would be an issue.

Rusk says it is not equally important.

Krause would pass it on or tabling it to discuss aspects of it, can we table it to a later date. Hendrick says with an delayed impact date, they would be looking at July 1 so a May date would be convenient. They would have budget in fo then too.

Krause changes her motion to table until they have an opportunity to talk with child support and John can work on the numbers. Pan seconds it.

Corporation Council says that tabling isn’t the right motion, they should postpone to a date certain, they choose 2nd meeting in May, the 26th.

Rusk is again confused about Robert’s Rules of Order . . . .sigh . . . . .

The motion fails 2 – 4. (Pan and Krause)

The motion for approval is on the table now. Schauer asks if they can indefinitely postpone, people say that means killing it. They discuss what it means and what can happen. They discuss that it will likely be pulled from committee or at least attempted. And if that means killing it. Rusk says he is fine killing it. Pan appreciates him saying that so bluntly. Pan asks what Schauer intends, is it the same as Rusk or do you want to work on it? He thinks moving it to a specific date is more conducive to work on it.

The motion is still approval despite all the discussion. More confusion about Robert’s Rules of Order.

Dorothy asks why John had his hand up, he says the idea of moving food service to jail so they don’t have to pay is kind of offensive to him. Rusk says he didn’t say they wouldn’t pay them, they get paid in Iowa. Hendrick is not in favor of that and isn’t sure how that fits in this discussion. He says it is not an an option between doing the right thing on jail reform and the right thing on living wage, the items in his list are not things they can use for jail reform. You can’t take Huber fees from people getting paid a living wage and then not pay them a living wage and use the money elsewhere, it doesn’t work that way, its not possible. $216,000 for the laundry contract by eliminating jobs in the community and not creating living wage jobs in the jail, I don’t think everyone can agree that is logical, that you should spend the money someplace else in the sheriff department. They savings of $450,000 for delaying the living wage is not money to spend on something else, if you don’t have a living wage you can’t save money by delaying it. Same with the $330, for phasing in the living wage. He hears the comments that the chair philosophically disagrees with it and wants to kill it, he understands that is what he is voting on, but he wants people to have the correct information and that this isn’t a list of 1000s of dollars, its all connected to the living wage except the budget surplus

Rusk says with all due respect, the $214,000 is only one part of it and we are talking about GPR and $900,000 to $1.3 is what we need to fund everything we are talking about over the last 6 months to do away with racial disparities in the jail so you can play games with only a little part form here and there but the problem is there is a tremendous shortage of GPR revenue which is the operating revenue , we have plenty of money for capital, we can borrow for bricks and mortar, but the operating revenue is what is so challenging to make the changes we need to jump start everything we need to do and i look at this and see ok, there goes almost a $1M that is off the table.

Krause would like to do all of the above, she would like to explore possibilities, she trust Personnel and Finance to fine tune things, she doesn’t want them to not have this thought o play with.

Some moves the question, Rusk ignore him, he says we should be the driver of the improvements of the system we want personnel and finance to do. Krause says she suggest May 28th. Rusk says there is a call for the question which he ignored.

The motion fails 2 – 4 (Pan and Krause)

Pan moves no recommendation. Krause seconds. Willett asks how they can do that, more Robert’s Rule and their rules, Rusk says in order to leave committee it has to have a positive vote on something. So Leland is trying to get a positive vote to leave committee to go to Personnel and Finance. Willett says a no vote means it ends here. Rusk says a no vote means it is stuck in committee.

And the vote is . . . of course, 2 – 4.

Krause says it can be brought back? Rusk says yes, he can put it back on the agenda whenever he wants to.