Planning Commission elects chair and vice chair; requests staff and attorney to rework bylaw draft

The Planning Commission elected Chair Keeney to serve another one‑year term and selected Commissioner Amy Lepper as vice chair at the March 18 meeting. Nominations and roll call votes were recorded; the chair and vice chair terms take effect at the following meeting.

Commissioners then discussed a staff‑requested review of proposed bylaw amendments. Staff summarized attorney feedback and flagged that explicitly embedding Robert’s Rules of Order into the bylaws could complicate meeting procedure and require member training. Commissioners generally agreed not to incorporate Roberts’ Rules text verbatim but to retain a reference to established parliamentary procedure where needed. They also declined to change quorum definitions to require a majority of the commission’s total seats for routine actions (noting such a change would often delay business) but asked the city attorney for clearer language on whether a tie vote constitutes denial; staff reported the attorney’s advice that a tie should be considered a denial and that the bylaws should state this expressly.

Commissioners asked staff to produce a clean consolidated draft with the attorney’s suggested edits (removing the Robert’s Rules insertion, clarifying quorum language and making clear a tie is a denial) and to return the item for further consideration at a future meeting; commissioners set a goal for the second meeting in May for the return. The commission also asked staff to provide the currently effective bylaws text alongside the proposed changes so members and the public can compare versions. No vote to adopt bylaw amendments was taken at the March 18 meeting; the direction to staff was procedural.