Charter Review, Post 7

Continuing to focus on what is in the current charter and what might warrant consideration by the new commission, and what the last charter review determined. To view the entire current city charter go to: https://www.ci.pomona.ca.us/mm/cityhall/pdf/city_charter.pdf

ARTICLE VIII – Appointive Boards and Commissions

Section VIII deals with commissions and appointive boards. This sets up the rules for appointing, replacing, and other such topics. This does not describe or talk about what commissions there should be.

801a states: All appointive boards and commissions shall have the same number of members as there are members of the Council. Each Councilmember within sixty (60) days of assuming office, shall appoint one member who shall be a resident of the City to each board or commission.

It should be noted that all “appointive boards and commissions” (emphasis mine). This would mean that any non-commission board set up by the city under this charter SHALL be of this size. This might be an issue for the Fairplex “committee,” the Cultural Arts Citizen's Advisory Committee, and some other committees that have been set up. This should probably be looked at.

801b states: Such appointed term shall be for four (4) years and shall commence with the term of the appointing Councilmember. No person shall sit on a board or commission after the expiration of his or her term. In the case of a re-appointment, the appointee must be re-appointed and sworn prior to resuming such seat. In the absence of a valid appointment, no person shall sit on a board or commission.

801c states: Any mid-term vacancy shall be filled by appointment by the appropriate Councilmember within sixty (60) days to serve out the unexpired portion of the term being filled. Any appointee may be removed by a majority vote of the Council. If no appointment is made within sixty (60) days of assuming office or following a mid-term vacancy, the Mayor shall appoint a member to the vacant seat.

This (c) part of section 1 was something that the previous commission looked at long and hard. There was, at that time, a problem of councilmembers not appointing to vacancies in a timely manner so that some commissions had long periods of time where 1 or 2 seats sat vacant. In an attempt to remedy part of that problem, the proposal in 2010 was to add this wording to the end of 801c: If no appointment is made within thirty (30) days by the Mayor, then any member of the City Council may nominate a candidate for approval by the city council at the next regularly scheduled council meeting.

802 is where the charter demands the creation of a planning commission. This follows state law. The 2010 ballot measure would have added the wording a Police Commission, following planning commission.

Since there are, once again, calls for a police commission, this is something that might want to be considered.

ARTICLE IX – Elections

This article covers how the city conducts elections, when it conducts elections, referendum, initiative, and recall, and special elections.

In 2010 there was a LOT of talk about elections. First, there was the issue of the mayor being in a cycle with three council seats making three of them “safe” to run for mayor as they didn’t have to give up their seat to run for mayor, while the other three had to give up their council seat to run for mayor. There was a feeling that this was unfair to the districts (and their councilmembers) who had to make that tough choice. Our solution was to move the mayor’s race to an odd year election so that it didn’t coincide with ANY council elections. Since then the state has pretty much mandated that all elections be held on even number years (note that the school board moved from odd years to even years). A solution I’ve been thinking about, but not sure it would work, is having the mayor elected to a 6 year term. This would ensure that every other mayoral election would be “safe” for a different group of councilmembers. I can see some disadvantages to this, and especially the OTHER option of having the mayor run every 2 years.

During the decade previous to 2010 we had many elections which had a large number of candidates running (as many as 10 in one district). This meant that the vote would be split in such a way that a candidate with as low as 20% of the total vote could (and did) win the office. That meant that 80% of the voters could have been absolutely against the winner, but that person won regardless. We looked at a primary system as we used to have where the top 2 candidates faced a runoff. Since this would require two elections, it was deemed way too expensive. So we researched and found that some states and the country of Australia had a “ranked voting” or “instant runoff” system where voters ranked their choice as 1, 2, 3 . . . etc. Currently, the state of Maine and 11 cities do this kind of elections including the California cities of  San Francisco, Oakland, Berkeley, and  San Leandro. Under this system, the bottom person is eliminated and the votes for that eliminated person then go to those voters’ #2 choice, if there was still not a winner, the bottom person was eliminated and their votes went to their #2 choice unless that person had been eliminated and if so it went to their #3 choice. This continued until you had someone with over 50% approval. Even then we recognized that the county who runs our elections would not process such ballots so we specified that it would only take place when the county was able to do so. This system would have been very complex, but it does work in Maine and those cities where it has been implemented. In 2020 cities that will be added to those with this system will be Las Cruces, NM, and St. Louis Park, MN. We might want to look at the costs of primary elections and see if that is a better way to go in the future.

Another item under elections was a concern about candidates who might decide to run for two different offices at the same time. This is not that unusual, with the winner of two offices usually choosing to take one and resign from the other. This causes an immediate vacancy which usually requires a special election (increasing costs). As a solution, we proposed that a section 905 be added which would have read:

Sec. 905 Concurrent Election.

The City Clerk shall not allow the placing on the ballot of any individual for more than one city elective office.

NEXT TIME: I’ll try to speed this up so will cover more next time.

Article X. - Financial Procedures and Commissions, Article XI. - Revenue Bonds, Article XII. - Contracts and Purchasing, and Article XIII - Franchises.