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A divided council voted to create a process to hire aides to help them with constituent services — to answer emails and phone calls, or attend meetings or do policy research — and council members have spent the last month trying to figure out exactly how that will look.

Councilman Brodey Weber plans to introduce a resolution at the next council meeting to clarify how hiring aides will happen — and the discussion about it illustrates how two council members who both championed the idea did so from slightly different perspectives.

To be clear: It wasn’t a new idea.

Weber had been working on the idea before the budget process started — and he’d wanted to use unappropriated dollars in the council’s budget so that council members could each spend up to $24,000 a year to hire part-time aides.

There wasn’t much appetite for it, he said, so he didn’t bring it forward, but Weber wanted to set up a framework because he suspected it would come up during the budget.

The idea had been championed earlier by Councilman James Michael Bowers who had argued a City Council elected to represent a city of Lincoln’s size should have a full-time staff member to help them — and had opposed a council vote a couple years earlier to eliminate the never-filled position.

Then, during this year’s budget process, Bowers brought a resolution forward to fund aides for council members, similar to Weber's idea (though he proposed a different funding mechanism).

There was a lot of debate about where the money should come from and whether the council should require background checks and drug tests and how the mechanism for hiring aides should work.

Regardless of those details, Bowers felt strongly that it was an equity issue. Council members who had full-time jobs or family responsibilities had a harder time meeting all their responsibilities than those who were retired, had more flexible jobs or had money to hire someone on their own to help.

He also saw it as an important way to give the Legislative branch of government some autonomy from the executive branch — in a city that has a very strong mayor form of government.

The mayor hires all department heads and makes many executive decisions without council approval, and Bowers felt that as a separate branch of government, the City Council should be somewhat less dependent on the mayor and her staff to do policy research and help constituents.

Weber said he thinks those things are important, but the 25-year-old council member had another priority, too: to give young people an opportunity to engage with their local governments.

“Really, my desire since I joined City Council was to help generate the next generation of policymakers,� he said. “I was elected at age 25, and there was a two-day orientation 13 days between being elected and taking office.�

He’s been politically involved since he was a freshman in high school, he said, and during election season there was always a campaign to volunteer on — but once the election was over, those opportunities disappeared.

“There wasn’t an opportunity for me to engage in the policy agenda I was supporting as a volunteer,� he said.

When he was in law school, he said, he saw how law students could clerk at law firms to learn the law and see what kind of law they wanted to practice. It seemed like a good model for future policymakers.

Allowing young people to engage in that way, he said, won’t just develop future policymakers, but businesspeople and community leaders.

Weber wants to hire a senior at Southeast High School who was instrumental in his council campaign.

But hiring young people is a bit different than hiring a professional, using the city’s standard consultant agreement, as discussed during the budget debate.

Weber said his vision was to hire the aide as a para-professional technical position, essentially a part-time city employee rather than a contract with a consultant.

The resolution, he said, will clarify both processes so City Council members can hire someone who fits their needs.

Either way, he said, the bottom line is to help council members better meet constituent needs.

About those young policymakers

Speaking of Weber, hat tip to the youngest City Council member, who a little over a year into his first term was named Citizen of the Year by the Lincoln Young Professionals.

A couple more notes

A few more notes from the mayor’s recent state of the city:

*More than 1,200 homeless individuals have been diverted to CenterPointe as part of a partnership between Lincoln Police and the nonprofit organization that specializes in mental health and substance abuse treatment. The program, an attempt to decriminalize homelessness, allows CenterPointe’s street outreach team to respond to some calls. Of those 1,200 people, the nonprofit has helped 25 of them find housing.

*The Lincoln Parks and Recreation Foundation has raised $7 million to pay for the city’s planned South Haymarket Park near Seventh and N streets, bringing the total raised so far to roughly $16 million — including $4.4 million in city dollars and $2.1 million in federal stimulus money from the state. Just $9 million more to go.