Washington’s Electric Utilities Advisory Commissions will be meeting monthly instead of quarterly.

That decision was made during the City Council’s meeting Monday. The council also tasked the commission with addressing two issues in the coming weeks and months — electric rates and the policy governing transfers from the electric fund to the general fund.

“The Electric Advisory Commission met last week, last Wednesday, and the committee decided they would like to start meeting monthly. So, starting next month, they’re going to meet monthly,” Councilman Larry Beeman said. “That’s a pretty large committee. They’ve got a lot of input for this organization. So, they decided to meet more often.”

Councilman Doug Mercer said the commission wants direction from the council on several specific items. “Two of the items that we talked about very briefly were the electric rates themselves and should we make an adjustment in this coming budget year and the electric transfer policy, which was updated in 2004, which really needs to be redone and looked at again,” he said. “I would like for the council’s consensus in telling the (commission) that we want the to address those two items, and then to give them the latitude as they are studying things, that if they see an item that needs to come to the council, they have the latitude to recommend items that we haven’t specifically requested them to study because of their activities.”

Beeman said that approach should apply to any and all of the city’s advisory boards.

As for vacancies on those advisory boards, Mercer said the council’s liaisons with those boards should be diligent in recommending appointments to those boards when vacancies occur. Mercer noted that sometimes boards cannot conduct business because they don’t have enough members present (a quorum), which delays acting on time-sensitive items and forces some people to return to a subsequent meeting before getting decisions regarding their situations. “That’s really not a good way to do business,” Mercer said.

Council member William Pitt said the city needs to make sure members of advisory boards receive the training they need to make informed decisions. “We need to reach out into the hedgerows and highways, as Councilman Mercer said. If we’re not reaching out, they’re not going to find us,” Pitt said. “We need to reach out. We need to reach out with all this advertising we’ve done in the paper. Maybe someone doesn’t know what a board does. Maybe we need to be more explicit. That’s a good use of the PEG channel (CityNine). … We also need to consider social media.”