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Malibu council and staff discuss limits on direct contact, after-hours messages and role boundaries
Summary
City leaders and staff met in a governance workshop to clarify council vs. staff responsibilities, JPA obligations, city manager hiring priorities and informal rules for after‑hours contact after members and staff flagged cumulative burdens on executives.
Malibu City Council members and senior staff spent a workshop session reviewing the lines between policymaking and operational work, discussing how frequent direct contacts from council members — emails, texts and one‑on‑one requests — are affecting city executives’ time and morale.
The discussion was framed as an effort to “align our paradigms” so elected officials and staff can implement council priorities without undermining the city manager’s authority, a workshop facilitator said. The council and staff debated informal limits on after‑hours contacts, whether to route requests through liaisons and how to make the council’s expectations clear when hiring a permanent city manager.
Council members and staff described three recurring problems: (1) the cumulative time executives spend responding to…
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