Ordinance & Rules Making Minor Edits to Pittsfield City Code
PITTSFIELD, Mass. — The Committee on Ordinances & Rules is eliminating some redundancies in the city code and cleaned up some language in the council's rules and orders.
"This is all really housekeeping," committee member Melissa Mazzeo said at Wednesday's meeting.
The first amendment the City Council subcommittee made was to Chapter 6, finance and taxation. It voted to strike language from Section 6-44 "Department of Purchase-establishment; appointment of purchasing agent" to eliminate redundancies.
Director of Finance Matthew Kerwood said the City Council recently approved an ordinance that eliminated the bonding requirements for the police chief and the commissioner of public services. This would extend this elimination to the purchasing agent.
"Now that we carry professional liability insurance, there is no reason for these individuals to be bonded," he said. "It is not a huge amount of cost savings, this bond is around $500, but it is just one of those things that reduce redundancies where we already have mechanisms in place."
The change strikes the sentence: "The purchasing agent shall furnish bond for the faithful performance of his duties, in such form as shall be approved by the city solicitor and in such sum as shall be determined by the mayor."
The committee then looked at a petition from Kenneth Warren asking for a review the use of the words "committee on public works" in the Rules and Orders of the City Council.
The committee voted to change the name to Public Services and Utilities. Chairman Peter White said that it really was a matter of semantics.
"It is pretty straight forward," White said. "We have to amend it to include public services and public utilities."
Warren put forth a second petition that asked the committee to review the use of the words "public works" in the city code for consistency.
The committee voted to ask the city solicitor to go through the city code and change "public works" to "public services."
"Which is something that I think we have started in general. There may be a few stragglers," Mazzeo said.
White noted that this change should only be made in reference to the city, not the state.
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