Charter Review Committee - Regular Meeting

come back through if there are a significant number and you want to call them down to more important ones type of thing or identify the ones that you feel are most important when going to council. Just because an issue has been raised does not mean there has to be an amendment. It's really just being raised for discussion and consideration. To that end, if you have any sections that you saw kind of stood out to you as to why that is a certain way or anything, please go ahead and email Curt. I'm on emails, yeah, and myself. And we can add them to the overarching list. My hope is next week to give you guys kind of a overarching what we think the schedule will look like for each sections, even though you're getting them in advance, for those of you who were the study ahead items in school. OK. I'll do that next, or kind of walk through that a little bit next. Anything else you wanted to say on the process?

As I think we've communicated with you, we're not looking for you to sort of pick and choose which sections. If you see something that you're aware of maybe has been a community concern from the past, I know one that's been pretty prevalent that was in the news about a year or so ago was the petition process, the petition and those kinds of things. That is a section we're certainly going to look at doing probably a complete revision because there was some the interpretation was open, and there were some strong community sentiments that it wasn't well addressed, so we're gonna be looking at that section very, very strongly. And there's other sections that either council has made us aware of that they would like for you to review, or other sections that maybe are no longer In effect or anything like that so we'll be bringing sections for you to look at and and tell you the reasoning behind why they're there's looking to be an amendment so We'll certainly be able to walk you through each of those steps Before I go into the background kind of of what a charter city is how city government works

those of you who need a refresher or may not be that intimately knowledgeable are there any questions or anything so far okay so the state of ohio has two types of cities the state calls them charter cities and non-charter cities i call them charter cities and statutory cities so if you are a charter city think of it this way The charter is the constitution, just like our federal constitution or our state constitution. And if you write a charter and adopt a charter, you then have what's called home rule, and you get to set, with an asterisk, pretty much whatever laws you want. Obviously, there are things that the federal constitution and the state constitution, Vandalia can't override, public meetings, those kinds of things. But for the most part, Vandalia can really set its own regulations on how it's going to run its city. If you are what's called or what I call a statutory city, it means you are governed by the Ohio revised code and you can't go outside what the Ohio revised code says. Um, Just to give you some examples, Troy is a statutory city. Tip, Vandalia, Huber, Clayton, a lot of them around here are charter cities. Every charter, just like every constitution, is similar. Every charter is similar, but every charter is different. So what Tip, Huber, whomever has adopted has all the same flow items, but they're different. So if you're used to hearing, well, they do this or they do that in a certain city, that may or may not be appropriate or able to be done in Vandalia because of the way the charter's written. There's also, once you are a charter city, you get to pick your form of government. So Vandalia has a city council, city manager form of government, where the council is the legislative body and the city manager is the day-to-day administrator of the community. So council sets the law, sets the rules, and then the city manager enforces and enacts essentially the work that the council wants accomplished. Council, there's Legislation really falls into two categories in the city world. There's an ordinance, which is, think of it as a permanent law. And then there's resolutions, which are the day-to-day detail. It's permanent for that one act, but it's only about that one act. So resolutions are used to enter into contracts. ORDINANCES WOULD BE USED TO ADOPT ZONING CODE BECAUSE THAT'S GOING TO BE PERMANENT. THE PURCHASE OF THE VEHICLE IS A ONE-TIME SITUATION. PUTTING ASSESSMENTS ON TAXES FOR LACK OF MOWING. IT'S A ONE-TIME ASSESSMENT. WHETHER IT'S AN ORDINANCE OR A RESOLUTION, IT'S REALLY my world. You don't necessarily need to worry about what should be and what shouldn't be one or the other. But we are going to be looking at various parts of those sections of the charter because ordinances require more meetings to be passed. They don't immediately take effect. There's a lot more public notice that has to be given with ordinances, again, because it's a permanent law. With resolutions, unless otherwise stated, they take effect immediately. Ordinances have two readings and then 30 days once passed. There's also, you are required to have an opportunity for the public to comment on an ordinance. While there's public comments in the meetings, you don't have one specifically for that piece of legislation. Just kind of a preview of things looking at. Part of one of the items we're going to look at is the fact that there are things done by motion and vote, which is not legislation, but that's not actually identified in the charter as being allowed. So when a member of council is absent, council votes to excuse them. Under the charter, theoretically, someone could argue that's not allowed because it's not identified as an action council can take. Council also establishes the boards certain boards certain commissions certain committees like yours with that the as you had to do at the last meeting you had to take the oath because you are now part of a public body those the people on the public body are under the same conflict of interest same those kind of rules as anyone else who sits on council or sits on planning board or BZA or anything like that. Public body means public meeting. So Angie is recording the meeting. It will be posted, right? Yeah, it will be posted. All deliberation. and discussion must be done in part of the public meeting. So we would request that you not have a meeting of three at Wendy's to discuss any of it, because that is happening outside the public record or the public open meeting law. Anything, any questions so far? Okay, the meetings are posted as a public meeting and the agenda is posted as well. Minutes will be posted. As we said, we kind of went through some parliamentary procedures and then voting and conflict of interest. So any thoughts, comments along those lines? Okay, I know almost all of you have been parts of public bodies before, so it's not a new concept. Oh, social media. The second you invite comment on a social media site about the work you are doing, you have just made your page a subject to public record. We would strongly suggest that you not seek comment that way. Also, do not use Vandalia logos, type anything like that sharing a meeting notice is not necessarily inviting comment but again you might get comment that suddenly unintentionally you have created your private page a vandalia public forum um so just be very cognizant be very aware that it's a slippery slope you might say when it comes to social media and we even have some guidelines in the handout as far as what you might do. Also, your personal notes, as long as they are for you and you alone to use are not public records. The second you start publicly sharing them or using them for other people, or taking them for other people, then they go into the line of public records and would have to be filed with Angie. So by all means, for yourself, take your personal notes during conversation for preparing for the meetings, but again, they are for your personal use. Oh, amongst... amongst each other or with the public? Yeah. So you can, if, when you are on the commission or committee and people know that you are on the committee, you also need to be very careful if someone says, hey, what about this particular section? What did you guys decide? You need to be very clear that you're speaking for yourself and not for the committee. or for the city of Vandalia. So it's always that preface with, well, I think, I don't know. And then, you know, committee hasn't decided or we don't know. So it's kind of an odd situation because you're working to amend the city charter. Obviously, you're open to hearing what other citizens have to think about it. But again, it's a slippery slope if you start going out bringing it up, expressing your opinion without being very careful how you're doing it type of thing. Anything else on that?

Okay. No, I mean, you may be approached and offer a resident or voters views on certain matters. you're, you're, I would encourage you to listen to what they have to say, listen to their perspective, seek their, their information. I would be cautious how much you feed back to them as far as how your, your views or decisions are going to be made, you know, because obviously there's five of you sitting here and one may not be the majority in, in that thinking thought process, but you, you are welcome to listen to the public's comments or any feedback that they may give you throughout this process. You can't shut them down. You don't have to shut them down or stop them, but just be very cautious. Like she said about the comments you may make.

No other, um, aspect to it. And I thought about this as I was drafting this handout. where conflicts of interest could come up um obviously if when you're on council and there's a contract being voted on it's clear whether or not there's a conflict of interest i was having a hard time coming up with what an example of what the conflict of interest might be in reviewing the charter amendments um but If there is one, make sure you identify, if you have identified one of yourself, please make sure to identify it to the rest of the committee so that it can be dealt with in the appropriate way. I still haven't come up with an example. So if any of you throughout come up with one, even if it doesn't apply to you, I need one from the future.

Don't accept anything of gratuity, of any value to sway your vote. That's pretty much the basis or the foundation for it.

Yeah, there you go. And then just at the very end, we had just bare bones expectations to attend the meetings and advise the city manager of any anticipated absences. Obviously, emergencies come up and things like that. So just to the extent you can let Angie and Kurt know ahead of time, that day that you're not going to be here, that would be helpful. And then, you know, again, you're representing the community in doing this and not a particular group. So, and no one's planning to move in the next six months, right, out of the community? Excellent, okay, that takes care of the residency stuff. Okay, so with that, Madam Chairperson, Is there are there any other questions or anything?

sir You had said something earlier about sending emails Regarding any questions we may have or topics that we think need to be reviewed Descending something from our personal email to the city Create any linkage between our personal account and the city. Are we opening our inbox or our outbox? to public scrutiny

That is a very good question. And only thing relating to the committee business.

OK. Yeah.

Yeah. It should not link to anything else. But it would probably be a good idea not to email each other. If you don't want to continue to expand that, box or that connection, emailing each other about what's being discussed or things like that. But I think if an email to Kurt about I'd like to look at this section, it should stay within that one topic.

Very good. Thank you.

Yes. Feel free to pick up the phone and call as well if you'd prefer. did not even worry about it. Good question. Anything else? OK. Do you want to take over the meeting, or would you like me to keep going?

Sure. Great. We'll move on to number five, the charter provisions for review. And it looks like the first section up is section 3-2, the term of office. Ms. Wall.

So this actually, as you are aware, the council is currently in the process of filling a vacant council seat. As of last Friday, council member Follick has resigned. And I noticed it and another council member noticed that there's this situation where it says, if there's a vacancy as a result of the mayor, of a council member moving to the mayor seat, that it's filled, the council member seat is filled by the next highest elected individual. I'm pretty sure they meant at the time of the election that a council member moved to the mayor. So in other words, he's in the middle of a term, for his council seat but the mayor seat was open and he ran and was elected and so the charter says okay the next person with the highest vote moves in as if that was a seat open and being run for um that is not necessarily the situation every time the mayor seat becomes open it very well could be that the mayor has resigned in the middle of his term and the vice mayor moves up until the next election. So we had this apparent gap in the charter that suggested you could be three years into a term, and we're going back to that election three years prior to fill the empty seat. From my perspective, if that would happen midterm, it seems to be more reasonable to have council fill it as if it was any other vacancy than one created due to the election of the mayor. So my first question to kind of guide you through this analysis is if you read these two paragraphs, is the language consistent? Am I reading this? inappropriately, do you all read it where it reads the other way? Thoughts, comments? Should we read out loud? Mrs. Cox, do you want me to read the section? I don't know how you, this is probably, I'm not sure how you guys want to do this, but we're kind of feeling it, we're feeling our way through this one.

I guess I would assume that everybody has, prepared for the meeting and had read this section ahead of time with it being in the agenda, correct? So I don't know that we need to read it verbatim, but maybe a few minutes to refresh ourselves. Yes. I'll invite comment when you're ready. I'll start. I interpret it the same way. And it seems like it should be consistent. The mayor treatment should be consistent with how we're also treating vacancies for council members. And that's not how it's currently written. I would assume it looks like you have proposed changes, but, but yes, I did interpret it the same way.

See, I didn't that second part of the sentence should a vacancy in council occur between elections and the time of taking office. So it's an, and it's a very specific time. It's saying at the time, if, if we've got a change of seats and that's when the vacancy occurs, this is what we do. Not three years later, the vacancy occurs. that's at the time of taking office.

I think one of the other problems I had with this section as written is the last sentence reading that it is up to the Board of Elections to determine the next highest vote getter. Is that in that current mayoral race or is that in the prior council race? So it was ambiguous at best. So striking it in its entirety there was a really good idea.

So the goal of my proposed revisions was essentially that if the vacancy occurs in council as a result of someone gets elected and then says they can't serve before being sworn in, or if it's the result of the person moving to a mayor seat then it would be filled by that next highest vote. Any other vacancy would be filled by council, essentially. So in other words, I'm going to use people. It's just easier in my mind. Let's say council member Hathaway council member Herbst or mayor Herbst wasn't running anymore or didn't run again. And council member Hathaway ran and was elected, but still had two years on his current term. Um, he would move into the mayor seat and the third or fourth highest, depending upon how many people were running or seats were open, would go ahead and take council member Hathaway seat because it was at the time of the election of the mayor.

Is that the third or fourth or the, Of the mayoral election? In the, of the council.

Of the council, yeah. So let's say there's three seats open, five people are running. Council member Hathaway's not actually up for reelection. He's in midterm, but he ran for mayor. So he gets elected mayor. We now have three empty seats. So his, well, I'm sorry, we now have four empty seats. And so the fourth person, I need a whiteboard. The fourth person then would take Council Member Hathaway's seat because the three were already filling the first three seats that were actually empty. This was much clearer in my mind before.

What gets confusing is you have elections every two years. leaves after the third year, there's where you get into the four-person filling a seat. Because you're already trying to elect three new members plus that fourth one. That does get a little confusing.

There are times that four seats, because the mayor seats open along with three seats too. So there could be a time where you need technically five people running in order to fill the seat that way. If a current council member was running for mayor.

A current council member who was not otherwise on the ballot.

Who was not otherwise on the ballot, yeah. Yeah, whose seat was not, whose term was not otherwise up, yeah.

So in your proposed revision then, The existing language is still in there. It's removed from the second portion, but not clarified in the first paragraph. So we still have the ambiguity. Is it the mayoral election that is determining that, or the council election that's determining that, or the prior council election for that particular seat that is determining that for the next highest vote?

And we can easily address that. Sir? I want to call you judge. Say that again. Eric.

Always been Eric.

It's hard. Charlie, you taught me well. We can certainly add to make it clear that it's that existing council election.

I think that's necessary. See, I think the addition of the new sentence makes it more confusing. I think you could add about five words to it. should a vacancy of the council occur between elections at the time of taking office the candidate receiving the highest number of votes but not elected to council as determined by the board of elections shall be appointed to the new by the newly elected council i think that I think the sentence in red makes it more confusing.

The only thing is that in your... The only problem with your situation is the person whose seat is being vacated, if they're moving to the mayor, was not on the ballot. So that seat was not up for election.

Right, but what you're saying is we've got three open seats and there's... three to five people running. Person number four is who's coming in, which is why you say the highest number of votes but not elected, because if you say the fourth highest number of votes, if you happen to have four, but not elected to council as determined by the Board of Elections. So basically that's saying whoever has the next highest votes but didn't make the cut to be elected, is who is going to be elected into the now, the newly opened county. Correct.

The language in red identifies when this applies. That there's a second category as to when this applies. So I didn't mess with or didn't make revisions to your language, which, by the way, is you're right, much clearer and straightforward. The language in red was to show that there's two situations where the next highest vote getter would be used to fill the seat.

What's the other? One is if... Council seats moving to mayor.

What's the other time this happens the other times this happens is when there's Someone is elected But then does not actually take the seat So in other words, I was nominated you were elected and I went never mind. I don't really want it or got unexpectedly transferred between November and Okay.

Yeah, January the term of office starts when exactly for council members I

January. January.

It is January. So, I mean, so it's basically the, the either the November 2nd, Tuesday or first Tuesday in November to January. That's one option or succession to mayor. Yeah. And everything else is during the regular term portion. That's the appointment.

Correct. Correct. Yeah. Yeah. It covers the situation of God forbid there's a death. God forbid there's a transfer change in family circumstances.

We're saying the candidate receiving the highest number of votes in that.

What Holly had said, and I didn't get it all down, but it was essentially the candidate receiving the highest number of votes not elected to council in the, I think you said, most recent council election or something along those lines, didn't you?

Actually, I think because... but not elected to council. You pray need to comment as determined by the board of elections. Yeah, I think that's all you need.

What would happen if we have three people running for three offices, all three get elected and we don't have anyone else.

Yeah, you do have that situation.

We have no next highest vote getter.

I'm going, I'm, I'm number four. I go to mayor and we don't have anybody else not nominated. How often does that happen?

No, do you often have it's available by election process council shall appoint the elector That's in it is that the last sentence yeah, okay, so yeah, oh yeah, I know that's somewhere, but Okay, I I don't think Vandalia has ever had that problem the villages Around here have that problem regularly

Does the word elector need to be candidate or individual? The way I read that is now the council is appointing somebody to pick.

Eric, yes, you are correct. If there's not that another body that was on the ballot, then they're saying it has to be someone who is a registered voter is what an elector means.

Yeah, I think now that I understand that you were getting at two of them, I still think adding two council would help. Yes. Just because you're specifying the list that you're going to.

I agree, yeah.

Otherwise, people are going to think the guy who didn't make mayor is the one who's going to take the seat.

Mm-hmm. Has... I don't know that anyone here would go back long enough. Has anyone ever run for mayor and a council seat because their seat on council was up at the same time the mayor seat was up? I don't think you can. I'm assuming you can't do that. I'm assuming you can only be on the ballot once.

Yeah, because you could end up being nominated for both.

Yeah.

That would be, yeah. You can only run for one seat.

If not, you should only be able to. That may be a state law thing. Any other thoughts?

Yeah, deleting those last couple lines I think helps condense the process. And you've already taken care of that.

I'm good with the changes that were set up here. I think the first part isn't very well. I had to read it a couple times.

Like what?

So with Holly's addition, what we'll do is the first item on the agenda for next week will be this with the additional revisions so that you guys can see it at that point and then review whether or not you want to go ahead and decide whether or not it'd be one to review move into the bucket for council or wait until the end to make that determination. Okay. Anything else? Okay. Since we're here, as you were reading the charter or reviewing it, were there any items that you saw that just kind of popped in your head that, geez, I hope we talk about that? Okay.

In section 3-2, the terms of office.

Is this Micah?

In section 3-2 on the terms of office, we've got all these dates from 1985, you know, 1989. How can we change, or if we're even discussing that this evening, change that language to eliminate the dates and make it so that it is a continual wording that we never have to deal with those dates again.

So I don't know that we really can because it sets up staggered seats. I can look and think about that some more, but in some ways we are, we need to make sure that it's very clear what those staggered seats are because it can be very easy if someone does have to fill a term for two years, suddenly people get confused what it is. That is partly my job, the clerk of council's job, you know, to keep the term straight and the Board of Elections term to keep the term straight. But that does set up the staggered terms. So, but I can look at what can be done without that.

As it works out, we have an election every odd calendar year in November. And then the council and mayors would then take their office on January 1 following that November election. You know, is there any language that just could eliminate dates, though?

Yeah, I understand. Yeah, it's just it sets up the start of the staggeredness. So I'll take a look at that.

Okay.

anything else in three dash two, because I also need to say, um, we can discuss 3.2 because it was on the agenda. Um, Angie does the notice say, and anything else that may be come before the committee?

The notice does not actually say, it only has on the agenda, it's listed on the actual public notice, it does not identify a particular section in the charter.

Okay, okay, so since the notice didn't identify a specific, we can talk about others. I've understood you correctly, that it didn't identify 3.2 as... In the notice, right? It did not identify 3.2. Okay.

I'm trying to pull it up on my phone.

No, you're fine. You're fine. I was going to say, otherwise we can bring up that you want to talk about them, but we can't discuss them. To put on the future addendas, yeah.

Could we move to amend the agenda and do so?

We could technically, yeah. We could do that. But yeah, I mean. I take it you have one that's not 3.2. I don't. Oh. Did you have others?

Well, I would like to have some discussion at the next meeting. Yeah. Regarding the first paragraphs of 3.2 on terms of office regarding how to... deal with the date issues that are in every paragraph, because to me it seemed wordy and it seemed a little ambiguous. It makes sense, but you're dealing with 1985 and 1986 dates. It kind of overrides what we're trying to do in updating the charter, I think.

I will definitely report back on what options there may be.

Happy to do that. Syntax, but there needs to be a space between the next paragraph three and four. Yes. I noticed that as well.

Before leaving 3.2, is there anything else in 3.2? Anybody?

I would just agree with what Mr. Atkins said. If there's a way to clean up that language and get away from dates that go back 40 years, I had that in my notes as well. I think that's a very valid point. But I understand the need for clarity there. But if we can find a way to do that without going back 40 years...

Yeah, I know exactly where you're going there. Okay.

It's probably some historical tracking that needs to be done. The only other thing that I noticed, and I had to find it, they have a tendency saying here general municipal election or from the municipality, but in that second paragraph, the second sentence, The mayoral candidates in the general election shall be determined by primary. It doesn't say general municipality. Do we need that word in there?

Say that again.

So the second sentence in that second paragraph, the other spots, we say municipal election. It says the mayoral candidates in the general election. It's not general municipal election. Do we need that word in there?

I would say if we are making other changes to this code section, it's an edit to go ahead and include. it would be one where it might not necessarily be worth putting on the ballot if we weren't making other changes to the section.

Any other comments to Section 3-2? Does anyone want to move on to any other sections within Section 3?

So first, are there other sections that you saw just throughout the whole charter that you want to make sure are included on the agenda for The committee to review. There we go. Yeah, at future dates, yeah.

The preamble and article one. I have some questions.

do you want to give us a summary of what you're looking at in those two I can if that would be appropriate that would be helpful so we know how to slot it in the agendas well the first I say with fear and trembling the opening statement in the preamble

being grateful to almighty God for the blessings of the liberty. I question if that is a wise statement to put in a preamble from the perspective of a separation of church and state. Okay. In article one, paragraph one, mentions local police, sanitary and other similar regulations. Um, I thought that was kind of a, an unusual collection of areas of government. Do we want to take a look at that? And there are a number of, uh, places in article one and I believe throughout the, uh, charter where there are some double negatives uh such as uh making regulations that are not in conflict with general laws would it be better to say consistent with general laws or consistent with the laws of the state of ohio and in the last paragraph of article one i think there was another double negative shall not, the listing of particular powers by this constitution shall not be held to exclude. Is that another double negative that would read better a different way? And in general, there are a lot of words such as charter, council, council members, mayor, et cetera, that are capitalized that are not proper names or titles. They reference a position or it is a condensed version or an informal version of a proper title. And I question whether those should be capitalized.

OK. Any others going down through that you saw as you were reviewing that?

I have one.

OK.

There we go. Section 3, or 3-3, under salaries, the third sentence there says salaries shall not be increased at intervals oftener. Could we change that to more often?

So that would be one depending upon, grammatically, yes, it needs to be fixed. That may be one that depending upon the number of other recommendations. May not make the... Sure. But that is very poor grammar.

Do you know when you're going to plan to address Article 8 elections?

For the most part, we're kind of going in order, so closer to the end. We anticipate doing the referendum section as its own meeting simply because we do plan to propose entirely new language for that and we anticipate there being a decent amount of discussion around that whole process.

I have a couple from section three, four. Yeah. Um, in paragraph three, Council shall take official action and conduct all deliberations upon official business only in open meetings unless the subject matter is specifically exempted by law. Should we cite the section of law since we are making a reference to a specific law or a specific section of law? Just a question.

Yeah, and I'm actually going to go ahead and answer that one. that would require a laundry list of citations. And so simply by referencing unless exempted by law, you could suddenly miss one and then not be able to go into executive session.

I understand. And then the last paragraph, the majority of the members elected to council shall constitute a quorum to do business, but a lesser number may adjourn from time to time. Maybe I don't understand what that language suggests.

Yeah, so what that means is if there's a quorum, there's two different situations. One, meeting comes, there is not a quorum to hold business. Those that are there that are fewer than quorum can move to adjourn that meeting.

OK.

Otherwise, because you'd have to technically have a quorum to take a vote to adjourn.

Okay.

Any others for future agendas? Yeah, yeah. I mean, as we're going through, this will be something at every meeting you can certainly, we'll have a section for. As we kind of alluded to the fact that the referendum one is probably going to take a meeting, originally I think I had talked to Kurt about it might being, the last just so that you guys were in the flow. You guys were really into it. But we may move that up just because there may be one of those situations where you want to talk about it at the next meeting in some detail as well. And I don't want it to feel rushed that there isn't another meeting after that, so.

Would it be possible in future agendas to include a line item, in this case it would be six, and any other provisions or matters that the committee determines? Yeah. Just as an opening, not an invitation to always do it, but an opportunity if we need to or so desire to not have it. Yeah.

Does that give us the runway to move ahead if we've gone through it quickly and can keep moving through sections?

I believe so, because the notice itself just says you're reviewing the charter. Um, the agenda also gives notice to the public, what you're planning to review. So I think that would give us the appropriate ability because in a special meeting, it's always the issue. And then, and any other business that might come before it. So I would say it's the same category. Okay, with that, any other thoughts on the process? Do any other thoughts on how we're presenting? Because I'm open to making this work for everybody kind of thing. Did it work having the sections being specifically and then kind of the questions and then the red line? Okay.

Do we have any other sections we need a whiteboard for though?

Apparently. As a mergers and acquisitions attorney, a whiteboard and drawing out that transaction works really well. We may need that here.

Do we need to move to adjourn? Yeah. Okay. With that, I will accept a motion for adjournment. So moved. Do I have a second? Second. We are adjourned at 6.47. Oh, do all those in favor signify by saying aye?

Aye.

We are adjourned at 6.48. Great job.