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Date: 11/21/OS <br />Item: 7. <br />City Policies <br />City Manager's Report <br />Friday, November 4,2005 <br />Page 6 of 9 <br />10. In Case Anyone Wants to Know.. .. There has been considerable <br />misunderstanding and misinformation about some policy statements that <br />have been compiled for several years in the back of city budget books. <br />This has even included the remarkable claim that all of you have voted <br />for all of these policies and all senior staff members have somehow dem- <br />onstrated support for all of them. <br />Here's what City Council minutes and conversations with long-time staff <br />show. <br />. No Council - not the current Council and not any previous Council <br />- has ever voted on a package of "city policies" as part of the <br />budget process or the budget book. No budget motion or budget <br />resolution refers to these policies, not even in a"whereas" clause. <br />Nor can we find that these "policies" were ever distributed to <br />Councilmembers for them to consider adopting as part of Council <br />budget discussions or budget decisions. <br />. These "policies" were originally written in the 1980's by department <br />heads and other staff members as "department policies" that de- <br />scribed the operations of their department. These "policies" were <br />apparently intended to memorialize then current department prac- <br />tices. There were Public Works "policies" about snow-plowing, <br />stormwater drainage, and procurement � professional consultants, <br />among other things. There were Community Development policies <br />about Code Compliance and Economic Development, among other <br />