Youngstown charter review panel steers clear of controversial topics

With a lengthy list of elected offices and likely two citizen charter-amendment initiatives for Youngstown voters to consider, is there room on the Nov. 8 ballot for seven more issues from the charter review commission?

That’s a question that will ultimately be decided by city council.

Of the six recommendations from the Youngstown Charter Review Commission and a planned seventh, none of them is controversial.

This is a presidential election year so turnout will be very high.

There will be plenty of people who will vote for Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton and not look at the rest of the candidates or the issues.

For those who will vote the entire ballot, their patience could be tested, particularly in Youngstown.

Even if the ballot language for the seven proposals from the commission is short, the wording for the anti-fracking and part-time workers’ rights charter amendments proposed by citizens will be quite long.

The city ballot will be at least three pages and could easily stretch to four or five. Take into account longer lines at the polls and some voters may fill in the ovals on the first page and skip the rest.

So city council has to balance the needs for the commission’s proposals with the patience of voters.

Voters in Campbell have the same candidates on their general election ballot as the rest of Mahoning County and will consider 14 charter amendments.

Ballot language

In comparison, Youngstown voters will see less. However, the ballot language on the two Youngstown citizen initiatives will be considerably longer than the ones being considered in Campbell.

In 2012, Youngstown City Council was presented with 17 proposed amendments from that year’s charter review commission.

Several of them would have completely changed the structure of city government – something council had no interest in doing.

Some of the significant changes included eliminating political partisan elections, no longer electing council president citywide and having the council members select someone from their own ranks, creating the position of vice mayor, reducing city council members’ pay, denying council members medical insurance if they could get it through their job or their spouse’s employer, requiring the city to redistrict its wards, eliminating term limits for mayor, making it easier to recall the mayor and council members and having the commission meet annually rather than every four years.

Unlike the proposals this year, the 2012 recommendations called for radical changes.

In the end, council approved four, but only two as recommended by the committee.

Those two were to create a conflict-of-interest policy and to change the starting and ending dates of daylight savings time, which the city already followed. The latter one has no business being in the charter and gives you an idea as to how disinterested that city council was in the drastic changes proposed by the commission.

Council agreed to eliminate term limits for the mayor, but not to create the position of vice mayor, and adopted a watered-down ward-redistricting policy permitting the boundaries to be changed after a “reasonable population change.”

After a lot of arguing, council redistricted two years later, but the same language remains in the city charter.

Also in 2014, a citizen proposal to cut the wards from seven to five was rejected by voters in a close race.

The commission will meet July 19 with city council and make its final recommendations July 26. Then council will decide what stays and what goes.

Housekeeping measures

The seven proposals are primarily housekeeping measures. They include eliminating a requirement that a member of the dismantled park and recreation commission be appointed to a seat on the city’s planning commission, which already isn’t being followed; deleting a $12 fine for council members for missing a meeting, a provision that likely has never been enforced; and eliminating language requiring city employees to live in Youngstown, which the city doesn’t enforce because the Ohio Supreme Court ruled it unconstitutional in 2009.

This commission wants to do what the 2012 commission sought – toughening the ward redistricting language.

The proposal is to redistrict after every census if there is a 7 percent population variance between the most- and least-populated wards, and eliminate the “reasonable population change” wording.

The commission also wants to change language that the mayor “shall” convene a charter review commission every four years rather than the existing “will” language.

The commission’s most controversial proposals are timid in comparison to the 2012 group.

Its members want to require council candidates to live in the ward they seek to represent for at least a year from Election Day with a provision allowing them to run if their home was redistricted into a different ward less than a year before the election.

The other proposal would allow the mayor to appoint people to boards and commissions who don’t live in the city if a qualified Youngstown resident couldn’t be found. Those appointments would need the approval of a majority of council.

We’ll find out in about a month what proposals council decides will be on the ballot.