Centerville to combine 8 charter amendments
Council takes chance voters won’t see any as controversial.
The city of Centerville CENTERVILLE — will look to place eight charter amendments on the November ballot with one caveat: they’ll likely be presented as one ballot issue.
During a City Council work session last week, council members agreed to have the proposed eight charter amendments combined into one ballot issue, taking a chance on the possibility of one of the amendments being viewed as controversial.
“I’d be stunned if this didn’t pass,” Mayor Brooks Compton said. “It’s not a presidential year. We have a lot of voters who pay a little bit more attention to local issues. I wouldn’t want to force the voters to have to go through multiple ballot issues. Let’s just address it as one.”
The amendments include revising a section that allows council to vote for a new deputy mayor in the event the acting deputy mayor fills a vacancy of the mayor, to remove the 75-day expiration of emergency ordinances and to allow council the ability to make “non-substantive” changes to the charter in the future.
Law Director Scott Liberman said the non-substantive changes would be for issues like grammatical errors in the charter.
Combining charter amendments into one ballot issue isn’t uncommon. In 2016, the city of Kettering had six proposed charter amendments combined into one ballot issue for the November election.
That situation spurred a citizen-led group to create five separate charter amendments to counteract what the city had proposed, including keeping term limits a part of the charter.
Centerville council members acknowledged that if one of the charter changes was viewed as controversial, the issues should be broken up to avoid a similar situation.
Liberman said the risk of combining them all is that if one amendment is viewed as controversial, a “no” vote would mean the other amendments fail as well.
In order to meet the Aug. 9 deadline to have the amendments placed on the ballot, the city will have to propose an ordinance for it at the June 19 meeting so it can be approved in July.