Amador County – The Amador County Board of Supervisors honored out-going Chairman Brian Oneto with a plaque Tuesday, before he passed the gavel to new Chairman John Plasse.

Supervisor Plasse of District 1 was selected as 2011 board chairman, and Supervisor Louis Boitano of District 4 was picked as vice chairman.

Plasse asked to postpone the assignment of committees until the next meeting “so that I can better review some of the requests I’ve seen.”

The board approved a schedule of cancelation of meetings due to holidays for the calendar, and also assigned the administrative committee to look into the reduction of meeting days to two per month, as suggested by Supervisor Richard Forster.

Forster said Yolo County was meeting twice a month for reasons of efficiency, and if a county as big as Yolo could do it, Amador should be able to. He said one-, two- or three-item meetings in the past were wasteful of staff time, and county money and “it’s not very efficient.”

Plasse agreed, saying with one item or 20, the staff time, mailings and postings are still there. He said he would like to streamline things a little bit. Boitano said they can talk to Patrick Blacklock, former Amador chief administrative officer, now in that postition at Yolo.

County Planner Susan Grijalva said Tuolumne County now meets twice a month and “it works.” She said public hearing notices are $200 for the first legal listing, and $20 for each additional hearing. Boitano said it makes sense to line up all the public hearings on one day and meet as long as it takes.

Plasse said “from up here I see one heck of a lot of staff time being eaten up sitting and waiting for their item to come up.”

Chief Administrative Office Chuck Iley said new software to allow audio broadcast of supervisor meetings was nearing activation, and they would eventually move to webcasting.

Story by Jim Reece This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.