Santa Clara County Grand Jury • 2018-2019 • Agency Response
Response to: City of Santa Clara: Public Records Access

(endorsed) Lisa M. Gillmor*

Published: August 27, 2019 6 pages
Ver PDF original

Findings and Recommendations 1 findings

F1 Page 4
The VTA Board, currently made up exclusively of elected officials from the Santa Clara County, Board of Supervisor, the City of San Jose and other smaller cities in the County, suffers from: - A lack of experience, continuity and leadership; - Inadequate time for the directors to devote to their duties to the VTA Board due to their primary focus on the demands of their elected positions; - A lack of engagement on the part of some directors, fostered in part by the committee system, resulting in VTA functioning largely as a staff-driven organization; - Domination, in terms of numbers, seniority and influence, by representatives of the Santa Clara Board of Supervisors and the City of San Jose; and - Frequent tension between the director's fiduciary duties to the VTA and its regional role, on the one hand, and the political demands of their local elected positions, on the other Response to Finding 1: Per the discussion and input of the Governance and Ethics Committee, the City of Santa Clara City Council "AGREES" with Finding 1.
Related Recommendations (3)
R1c
Page 4
As constituent agencies of VTA, each of the cities in the County should prepare and deliver to VTA and the County Board of Supervisors a written report setting forth its views regarding VTA governance, with specific reference to the elements listed in Recommendation 1a. These reports should be completed and delivered prior to December 31, 2019.
R1d
Page 5
following the completion of the studies and reports specified in Recommendations 1a, 1b, and 1c, the County of Santa Clara and/or one or more of VTA's other constituent agencies, should propose enabling legislation, including appropriate amendments to Sections 100060 through 100063 of the California Public Utilities Code, to improve the governance structure of VTA (which potentially could include an increase in the director's term of service, the addition of term limitations and the inclusion of appointed directors who are not currently serving elected officials).
R1e
Page 5
In order to provide more continuity in the leadership of the VTA Board, following the completion of the studies and reports specified in Recommendation 1a, 1b, and 1c, the County of Santa Clara and/or one or more of VTA's other constituent agencies, should propose enabling legislation amending Section 1000061 of the California Public Utilities code to provide that the Chairperson of the VTA Board shall be elected for a term of two years rather than one.

No Responses Found 1

Government entities assigned to respond to this report. No response documents have been linked in our database.

Santa Clara City

* This report's PDF did not contain easily extractable text and required Optical Character Recognition (OCR) for analysis. There may be minor errors in the extracted findings and recommendations due to OCR limitations with scanned documents.