A member of the Climate Change Advisory Committee recently resigned from the committee leaving 8 members. The ordinance establishing the committee (see attached, which is incorporated into the City's municipal code under Chapter 2.37 BIMC) set the number of committee members at 7 to align with other City committees and commissions. Due to community interest, the City Council appointed 9 members to the committee when it was established. If the Council would like to maintain a 9-member committee, staff will bring back an ordinance to amend the municipal code.

To put this issue in context, about 3 years ago the City Council worked to standardize the ordinances for the various advisory committees. The intent was to make the large number of advisory committees more consistent in how they were organized and operated. After a good bit of Council discussion, we landed on seven as the standard committee size. The thinking at the time was that it was important to keep an odd number of members, but a 9-member committee size created a risk that the group would fail to have a quorum too often. Reducing the size to 5 created a different challenge, since if more than two members worked together on a task outside of meetings, it would inadvertently create a quorum. Based on these considerations, the Council selected seven as a standard size for advisory committees.