READING, Pa. \u2013 Reading City Council voted Wednesday night to accept the resignations of Suzanne Cody, Michael McDevitt and Richard Polityka from the Historical Architectural Review Board.<\/p>\n
The resignations follow the Feb. 9 resignations of Erin Weller, Nigel Walker and Aaron Booth from the panel, which now leaves no board members on the nine-member HARB.<\/p>\n
The city has five historical districts: Centre Park, Callowhill, Prince, Penn\u2019s Common and College Heights.<\/p>\n
The board is an advisory citizens group composed of volunteer professionals and residents who are appointed by City Council.<\/p>\n
Whenever property owners in those districts wish to make any alterations to the exteriors of their buildings, they must apply to the HARB, and if any alterations are outside the HARB guidelines, they must appear before the HARB board during a public hearing.<\/p>\n
The reasons for the mass resignations remain vague, but earlier this month, Community Development Director David Barr informed council that the stated reasons for the first resignations focused on staff support of the panel \u2014 specifically, the keeping of minutes and the sending of the board\u2019s official decisions to the applicants.<\/p>\n
During its Committee of the Whole meeting earlier on Wednesday, councilmembers discussed having its nominations committee invite the members to exit interviews, along with human relations professionals from the city. Another suggestion was to have the former HARB members speak to council in a closed executive session.<\/p>\n
Council solicitor Michael Gombar reminded council that when members are appointed to any board, it must be done during a public session of council.<\/p>\n
Gombar said the same should apply to discussions on their resignations.<\/p>\n
He added that if the interview is done by the three-member nominations committee, there would not be an issue with violating the Sunshine Act.<\/p>\n
During the regular meeting, Councilmember Raymond Baker said with a mass resignation, the matter should be considered a policy issue rather than an HR issue.<\/p>\n
\u201cClearly, there is something wrong,\u201d Baker said. \u201cThis feels like it’s an issue that relates specifically to council, and I’d like us to somehow address it. I don’t know exactly how that would machinate, but an entire board does not up and resign all within three weeks\u2019 time because they all just got too much stuff going on.\u201d<\/p>\n
Managing Director\u00a0Jack Gombach said there are a couple of different things at play.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen you look at the resignations, there\u2019s some commonalities here,\u201d Gombach said. \u201cI think there is some\u00a0frustration shared by the board that we can ascertain from their resignation letters,\u201d Gombach said. \u201cI think it falls into two categories, one of them being policy; there are procedural issues. But then I do believe that there are some personnel-related aspects to that.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cAnd I think it also goes back to the staffing needs ,and consistent staffing needs to ensure that our boards and commissions and committees can properly run and function,\u201d Gombach added. \u201cThat\u2019s a difficult conversation because we obviously don’t have the resources to staff full time, every board and commission.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Council agreed it would continue working with the solicitors to determine the best way to handle the situation.<\/p>\n
The city administration has not made any recommendations on how to move the work of the HARB forward without any board members.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"READING, Pa. \u2013 Reading City Council voted Wednesday night to accept the resignations of Suzanne Cody, Michael McDevitt…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":123837,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[52548,2001,52547,29462,52544,3066,1093,52546,52545,39316,128,1095,130,129,58112,58113],"class_list":{"0":"post-123898","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-reading","8":"tag-aaron-booth","9":"tag-david-barr","10":"tag-erin-weller","11":"tag-harb","12":"tag-historical-architectural-review-board","13":"tag-jack-gombach","14":"tag-michael-gombar","15":"tag-michael-mcdevitt","16":"tag-nigel-walker","17":"tag-raymond-baker","18":"tag-reading-city","19":"tag-reading-city-council","20":"tag-reading-city-headlines","21":"tag-reading-city-news","22":"tag-richard-polityka","23":"tag-suzanne-cody"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/123898","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=123898"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/123898\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/123837"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=123898"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=123898"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=123898"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}