The Henderson City Council voted unanimously to amend city code to allow for the incorporation of the Clean Up Henderson committee into the city’s governing structure as an official city committee.
One of the major changes is that members will now be appointed by the Henderson City Council instead of the previous route of the committee selecting its own members.
The once-influential extra-governmental committee was successful in 2005 in securing $100,000 in state money for its 501(c)(3) parent group, The Friends of Clean Up Henderson, and is responsible for completing at least one major project, the dismantling and removal of the burned-out and collapsing South Henderson Elementary School on Old Epsom Road.
At the end of Council member Mike Rainey’s 2005 term, after an election lost to Lynn Harper, then a member and major player in Clean Up Henderson, Rainey made a speech to the council questioning the function, necessity, and legality of the Clean Up Henderson Committee with an emphasis on how it could come to subvert what should be city functions.
As the council prepared to vote on absorbing Clean Up Henderson, Rainey raised no further objections. He asked only if members currently on the committee would be selected for official seats. Member Garry Daeke replied that current members could fill such roles.
Under the city’s hegemony, the number of members on the committee will be held to nine selected by demographic and ward residence considerations. The first appointments will be made on a staggered three-year term basis.
City Manager told members that many who had been attending the Clean Up Henderson meetings were no longer doing so, and that meetings were mostly attended by city staff or city council representatives.
City Attorney John Zollicoffer said that no one would be excluded from attending the meetings, since Clean Up Henderson would become a government body.