Charter Review Committee - Regular Meeting

Good afternoon. We will call to order the September 24th, 2025 charter review committee agenda and start with roll call by our town clerk. Right. Chair Chair Mley. Vice Chair Marlo present. Member Cox is absent. Member guys, member Honeyut is absent.

Do we anticipate them coming today? Are they unavailable or? Um, member Cox, no. But, um, member Honeyut did say she was going to be able to make it. So, Okay. Um, next item on the agenda is the approval of the Janat July 9th, 2025 meeting minutes. Um, do we have a motion to approve those minutes?

We need a second. Motion approved. Any opposition? No. Um item number four is a discussion of the article 4 borrowing and debt limitation. I do believe in the prior meeting we tabled this discussion to have a little more in depth as to whether we wanted to involve ourselves in increasing or decreasing the de was there any discussion I did have one point of clarification apologies if it was covered previously but it seemed to me the charter was more like a framework left out the specificities to be ordinance. this particular section jumped out as extremely I guess my question was twofold one is that standard is it typic uh give you some thoughts on that so I I wouldn't Um, I wouldn't tell you that it's common. Like if you looked at at 10 given municipal charters in Florida, you wouldn't find it in seven of them. It is um it is a typical type of thing you will find. And the the most the most typical thing you will find is uh when there is reference to borrowing there will be usually reference to some sort

of threshold either a percentage or or something along those lines. Frankly uh usually the history of those provisions is there was some runin with debt in that city or town in the past or a runin with debt in a nearby city uh and folks said we ought to you know build in some breaks. So that that's in my observation that's where provisions like that tend to come from. So this is it is not a a completely alien creature. Thank thank you. That's helpful context. I guess do we have any history as to why the town of Oakland chose to put in this level of detail?

What I what I could learn was it was about the church. There was concern about That's helpful. Thank you. Sorry. So that context is helpful. I guess the the next question I would have is has this been an issue in the last Oh, hello. Sorry.

Hello. Um, no, not really. I think we've always stayed underneath the the debt ceiling, if you want to call it that. Um the only issue that we have with possibly limiting it is that um it's based on our taxable property value. So for whatever reason that goes down um or you set a set amount um and we need infrastructure, then we kind of limit ourselves. So the 2% allows us to increase based on our needs. So one drops off and then something else can come on. But it's never been a problem for us having too much debt or not enough. Okay. Any additional discussion or motions with regard to this provision remaining or might want to concern. It is a lot for somebody to read at the ballot. I mean, this whole thing would be in the ballot, right?

So, you would have a ballot summary of 75 words or less explaining what you're changing in this, whether you're deleting the whole thing or you're changing something from this to that or what have you. No, they wouldn't have to read it. They would they wouldn't be reading. They wouldn't be reading something this long. Well, you would be having to endeavor to explain to the voters why you should change some rule about town borrowing money.

Yeah. I mean, the only thing I could think of is I think Gabby had mentioned the second part of it for any sort of imprudence project. Um, does that fall under an exclusion for this or that be limited where it's like hey we can only do so much. So I believe the way that it's written right now is if we go above what we're limited then it needs to go in front of the voting. So you guys would have to determine if that's what you want to do. So, for example, right now we are looking at borrowing some debt um to build the new water plant or expand it. That's going to be about $6 million. So, right now, if we leave it as it is, we're within our our 2% to add that. If you reduce it, um then we're not able to borrow because we would have to figure out how we were going to do that. So, it would have to come in front of you guys, the citizens, and you would vote. So, um I mean, you could all vote for it and say yes, and that that would be great. Um but if you vote no and then what would the town do because we don't have $6 million to just spend?

I I do think that Wade said that would be an exception anyway because you're pledging your utility revenues towards that. So it might be a carve out anyway. Okay, great. So then yeah, but if we wanted to borrow 6 million for or maybe 10 million for a road project, let's let's just use that as an example where we're not going to get any revenue back from the users for that road project. And that might put us above the cap or a new building, right? like if we need to do a an addition of building to the town or something like that.

Just for my because it's been so long we changing really structurally here. I think we were were Yeah, there in prior meetings there had not been any affirmative proposal on the table to make any changes to this. I think you all just wanted to revisit it one last time to see if there were any changes that you all wanted to So this is the existing verbiage. This is the existing language and I would entertain a motion. I move we accept the section 411 as currently written. Second. Moved and properly second. Motion passes.

Now we will move on to discussion of article 4. Oh no public comment. uh we don't have any members of the public here and so I think at this point I would like to give the floor to our attorneys to have a discussion prior to the approval of the final recommended amendments members. Good afternoon. um before you uh for your consideration and uh hopefully for your approval is a draft final report of the charter review committee. Um this been put together so that hopefully if it meets with your approval with uh minor tweaks like changing the date on it. Um this would be the uh final result uh and report of your actions that you have taken here uh on the charter review committee. It provides an overview of the process you followed, folks you interacted with and different offices you interacted with to gather different information, a list of all the different issues you considered uh both ones that you did have recommendations on and ones ultimately you did not. just uh to record for posterity an explanation of the the kind of rationale for each of the uh recommended charter amendments. And then in the exhibit, the actual put together um ballot summary and uh charter language for each of the charter amendments that you all have previously gone through and uh taken an affirmative action to say you wanted to have included within your recommendations. the uh primary things I would ask you to focus on and provide

any changes or direction on uh to finalize this for your approval would be letting us know whether the the language in the the front body of the final report looks okay to you and uh back on the exhibit A that has the six ballot summaries and charter language. You all have seen all this charter language before. This is as it's previously been in front of you. You'll have not seen these uh ballot summaries uh prior to receiving this final report with your uh packet. So, if uh in particular yall took a look at any of these ballot summaries uh and looked at and said that's a crazy way to to say this, we need to you know tweak this or what have you. Now's the time to let us know. we can hash out any changes in that uh ballot summary language and uh and proceed forward. So, just to uh remind you, we've discussed this previously. Under Florida law, the way um ballot summaries are placed before voters for matters such as this, uh it's governed by certain rules. You have a ballot title of 15 words or less, then a ballot summary of 75 words or less. Um stylistically they can be uh proposed either as a question I structured grammatically so there's a question mark at the end or as a statement. Um the statute actually says it um that you're to provide a uh brief summary of the chief purpose of the amendment. And so each what you have here grammatically. I think these ones ended up being each one of them uh is is organized in the form of a statement stating what it is doing to the charter, how it is amending the charter. Uh sometimes grammatically or or for uh

voter comprehension and understanding. Sometimes it ends up being clearer stated as a question, sometimes clearer as a statement. as uh our office was putting these together, they seem to uh make more sense as uh statements and explanations. So uh we would uh be glad to hear any uh discussion or direction about any language changes to either the front part of the final report or uh any of the ballot. Oh, and one last thing. Uh the uh questions are organized one through six. Uh here um I don't recall whether we had previously discussed kind of an an order. You would have it as as the recommendation to the uh town commission, but these were there are many different rational ways to organize different amendments on the ballot. um the this organization just seemed like a rational um organization to our minds as we were putting this together. If you have any uh direction for reordering, we can implement that as well. may have zone there, but the bottom portion will that be on the ballot or will it only be the the title and

it's only the it's only the title, the explanatory statement and yes no yeah the the other parts with the strike through and underline and all that that does not go in the otherwise we'd have pages and pages of you can only imagine when they have those constitutional amendments on that uh say something it's very difficult to understand what it is and then it's adding four pages to the Florida constitution it would be I think you did a really good job summarizing words and so I'm completely fine with it for the uh report.

I will I will actually agree with that. I was reading the the ballot summary and questions would pop into my head, but of course by the time I got to the end, it was it was all there. I'm in agreement that um the ballot summaries and titles are consistent with um our discussion our approvals of changes and as it relates to the newly raised issue about order. I don't see that there's any you know logical way to reorder it other than the way it's being presented. And I don't want to I don't want to uh steal any credit at all. It was your town attorney Stephanie Bella who put all this together. I just

did a rearranging of a word or two. So well we pay the big bucks. Thank you so much Stephanie for your time and attention. If we have no further discussion then I think we would the final report and recommendations to the town commission. to approve and I will second it. All in favor? I. No opposed.

Our work is done. However, this obviously the final report will be submitted to the town commission for their review and a vote to move forward for the March. No other business. I believe we can adjust it.

I I just want to say one thing. I think what we can do back to I think you've made this point before is it is such a short summary that people might not understand what that means and I know we can't advocate one side or another but um once the commission approves on it I think we can do some educational pieces to the residents question by question what it you know kind of in layman's terms what that means um and and kind of um just summarize it a little bit more so that they understand they can look at a document and say when I go to the ballot if I'm you know this is what it means and we can post the report and the verbage change on the website so if yes they can absolutely do that

change and then maybe take the questions one at a time and just explain them a little more

and the just so you all know the legislature has had the last many years um clipping the wings of municipalities a little bit in what they can and can't say and how they can and can't say about um things that are going on the ballot. Um posting this on the website perfectly permissible. What the legislature clamped down on a number of years ago um was uh doing like say direct mail pieces. Obviously spending public money saying vote yes on this and so on. They they try to clamp that down. Uh some folks um uh figured out some ways around it. I won't take any credit for that. Um sorry that long story for some other jurisdictions got the uh division of elections to agree to some ways around it. Uh the legislature uh then patched up all those holes and as a result now um there's uh we can't do any mail pieces at all even explanatory ones but we can put together explanatory pieces that can be available on the website available on paper to folks uh at public places. So there's still a lot of ways the message can get out to explain things.

Can any of it be discussed at an at a commission meeting? Absolutely. They can bring this week. We're going to talk about this is the first one. Do you have any answer questions from people? 100% all day long. That that discussion would likely be led by our town attorney for the explanation of it. Okay. Awesome. That sounds like a good plan of action forward. No other business. I believe we will adjourn this meeting at 4:21 p.m. Does this mean I'm officially a past charter review committee member now?