On February 8th the city council held a work session to go over the suggestions made by the Charter Review Commission. Every councilmember except Councilman Perkins was there, and the discussion was very good and a lot of progress was made. I attended and, while I wasn’t able to participate in the discussion, I took notes and will explain the situation here. You can watch the recording below.

Number of Ballot Items

One of the issues that will need to be determined is how to present these changes on the ballot. If we put too many different changes on one ballot item, there is a risk that voters will reject many good changes that they like because of one issue that they don’t. Having too few ballot items also risks making those items way too long. On the other hand, you don’t want to force voters to have to go through too many items and start to feel fatigue.

This is an issue that will need to be decided at the very end of the process when we know exactly what the changes will be, but right now the proposed split into 3 ballot questions makes a lot of sense. These 3 questions would be to require a public vote before selling a municipal utility, whether to continue having primaries for the mayor and city council elections, then everything else. The first 2 would be separate because they are likely to be the most controversial proposed changes.

Eliminate Primaries

This will likely be the biggest and most controversial proposed change to the charter. Currently for city council and mayoral elections the city has to hold a non-partisan primary if there are 3 or more candidates on the ballot, with the top 2 vote getters moving on to the general election.

The argument against this system is that they are expensive for the city to run (it costs the city approximately $100,000 to put an item on the ballot) and we don’t get much for that expenditure. Independence is one of the very few cities in Missouri that holds a primary, and those who don’t have few issues. These primaries also get very low turnout (the District 1 primary being a prime example, where there are over 17,000 registered voters but less than 900 voted in the primary).

However the city council members were universally pro-primary. The main argument was concern over the winner of an election having less than 50% of the vote. The discussion was more over the winner not feeling like they had a mandate, but my concern is more about a winner potentially not representing the majority of their constituents. If you have 3 candidates, with 2 being similar and aligned with the majority, with 1 being very dissimilar and not aligned with the majority, you have the potential for the majority to split their votes allowing for the minority candidate to win the election.

One way to resolve this issue is to use ranked choice voting, where voters can select 2nd and 3rd choices, eliminating a lot of the concerns with an open general election. However, this is not currently allowed in the state of Missouri, so we will have to wait until it is passed by the state before we could implement it. This is my preferred option.

Personally I can see both sides, and the results of the 1st District primary moved me closer to the anti-primary side, but I am still more in favor of keeping the primary until we can used ranked choice. I am still concerned with potential vote splitting, leading to candidates being chosen not by voters, but in back room deals.

Municipal Judge Selection

There was some discussion about how to go about selecting municipal court judges. The municipal court system is treated a little different than most of the city, as it is one of the few city departments that does not report to the City Manager. The consensus of the council was that nominees should be sent straight to the council as a whole instead of going to the mayor first.

There was some discussion over whether or not there should be a residency requirement for judges. Mayor Rowland ultimately won the day by arguing that Senate Bill 5 had neutered the court’s power, and that until it was repealed we needed to have the best possible candidate regardless of where they lived.

Candidates Camping and Tax Delinquency

One of the proposed changes suggested by the Commission was to eliminate the need for candidates to camp out before turning in their signatures to be on the ballot. Currently the order of names on the ballot are determined by who first turns in their signatures, so it is common for candidates to camp out at city hall the night before to ensure they were first on the ballot. There was broad agreement that the order should be determined randomly for candidates who turned in their signatures on the first day.

Another issue was disqualifying candidates who are not in good standing with the city. Already any candidate that hasn’t paid their taxes is barred from the ballot, but Councilman Hobart in particular wanted to expand this to include things like outstanding warrants and unpaid utility bills.

This is understandable, you don’t want people who are trying to avoid paying what they owe to be on the council. But my concern is that this could prevent people who are in bad standing due to poverty from running. In practice this is unlikely to occur, since people in poverty rarely run for office. But it should be considered that a good candidate who has a bad financial situation (a perspective that is often lacking during discussions, by the way) could be further discouraged from running than they already are.

Selling Utilities

This is mainly driven by the controversy over potentially selling the city-owned IPL. People are very distrustful of the city council, and allowing IPL to be sold by the city council without a public vote could tank these charter changes.

It is not surprising then that the proposal to require a vote before selling a public utility had wide agreement and required little discussion.

Public Engagement

One section that didn’t get the conversation I felt it deserved was the proposed section public engagement. It was pointed out that the Commission’s proposed version was quite long, so Fears’ memo suggested trimming it down.

Trimming it down is fine, but that section had very important parts saying that the city should make an effort to engage the entire community and needs to “proactively reach out to the community in its full diversity”. This is an area where the city needs to do better, and putting this mandate in the charter will give a powerful motivator to actually take action to improve engagement with the entirety of Independence residents.

Next Steps

Finally there was discussion of how to move forward. The council had a sense of urgency, while still wanting the process to be as open as possible. Councilwoman McCandless suggested having a Study Session on February 26th that was solely dedicated to going through the Charter changes piece-by-piece, especially wanting to avoid the controversy that occurred after many people felt that the purchase of the GEHA building had been rushed through with little opportunity for public comment.

It would then get a first reading on the April 4th city council meeting (the first meeting after the elections), and a second reading on April 15th to be voted on, then placed on the ballot in August.