National City has a veterans advisory committee that has met only three times since being established in 2017.
Part of the problem is that the mayor and City Council took nearly two years to appoint 11 to the volunteer committee tasked with advising the city on veteran and military issues. Another problem is that committee regularly fail to find the time to participate, so meetings are routinely canceled for lack of a quorum.
“I think this was set up to fail,” said Councilwoman Mona Rios.
The Veterans and Military Families Advisory Committee was officially created by the City Council in February 2017. The mayor and council didn’t finalize appointments until July 2018 and the committee’s first meeting was held in February 2019.
The committee met three times since February 2019 and either cancelled or failed to reach a quorum in four other meetings. All future meetings have been canceled because of the COVID-19 pandemic.
City staff said part of the problem is the fact that there are 11 people in the committee, so coordinating times for everyone to meet has been challenging.
“Despite the efforts of the chair, committee , and city staff, it has been very difficult to achieve quorum and establish a solid mission for the group in order to completely fulfill the original charge of the committee,” Assistant City Manager Tony Winney told the City Council during Tuesday’s meeting.
During that meeting, Councilman Ron Morrison proposed reducing the number of in order to make it easier for the committee to establish a quorum and finally start advising on issues the veteran population deals with.
The council voted 3-2 on Morrison’s proposal, which means staff will come back with a plan to reduce the number of people on the committee to nine, seven or five people.
Mayor Alejandra Sotelo-Solis and Rios voted against Morrison’s proposal.
They thought the committee needed to be completely dissolved and replaced with another one from scratch. Sotelo-Solis thought a clean slate would be the best idea.
“Without a pause, it’s going to be status quo and it’s not going to go anywhere,” Sotelo-Solis said.
Rios criticized the current committee because seven of its 11 live outside of National City. She wanted to dissolve the current committee and replace it with one where the majority of are National City residents.
Morrison countered that the committee was too important to dissolve. He thought it would be better to simply fix what is wrong with the existing committee.
“I think it’s important that we retain this,” he said. “I think it’s going to send a strong message to our veterans community not only retaining it but putting it into a workable form.”
