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position. Moreover, while there are some advantages in having a new City Manager select the senior directors who will work here, there is also the potential disadvantage of having someone who may be new to the City hire someone for a department that he or she is not familiar with in a community he or she may not be familiar with and with a Council and Planning Commission �Ze or she may not be familiar with. Finally, I think my track record of hiring department heads here is pretty good. 4. Councilmember Ihlan mentioned possibly reconfiguring department operations. I don't know what she may have in mind. For my part, I have considered various ways of parceling out the functions in Community Development to other departments but rejected them for several reasons. One, we are a flat organization now. While flatter can sometimes be better in terms of cost and control issues, there is a point of diminishing returns where the public is not well-served by an organization with inadequate direction and leadership. I believe there is a great danger of inadequate leadership if we ask other senior staff to handle community development functions in addition to the important responsibilities they are already handling. Two, the current organizational structure allows us readily to track the costs the City incurs in planning, zoning, permitting, and inspecting activities; therefore, we can adjust fees to cover those specific costs. If those functions were parceled out to other departments that are tax-supported, it would be more difficult and expensive (though certainly not impossible) to isolate these costs that can be passed on in the form of fees. In other words, our cost accounting is more transparent when the entire department is fee-based — such as Roseville's Community Development Department — rather than being supported by a mixture of taxes and fees. When there is a mixture of such funding sources, we would have to sort through those various funding sources and carefully track the time staff spends on tax-supported vs. fee-based activities. This is because there is a state law that says development fees must be cost- based and must not be used to subsidize other city activities, such as street construction or fire fighting. �