Charter proposal has limited reach
It’s creative, but effectiveness seems iff y
Aproposal by the Columbus Charter Review Committee to expand the current seven-member council to nine, and to have council candidates run from designated districts aims to combine the best of two different models.
Currently, city council members run at-large as opposed to running as representatives of specific areas of the city, as in a ward system. This has led to the criticism that council is not truly representative of the city’s many neighborhoods, and as a result, some neighborhoods receive little city attention or largesse.
Defenders of the at-large system say it guarantees that candidates look out for the interests of the entire city, not just a piece of it, as happens in a ward system. They also say this eliminates the backscratching and logrolling that occur with ward systems.
The proposal put forward by the review committee seeks to combine the benefits of at-large elections with those of district representation. Council candidates would run for a seat in a specific district, but they would be elected by all city voters. On its face, this would appear to be the best of both worlds, ensuring that each city district would have a resident on city council, while ensuring that the council member would keep in mind the interests of the city as a whole.
However, Brad Sinnott, chairman of the Franklin County Republican Party central committee, says that this would not necessarily guarantee that the council member would represent the interests of his or her district. He draws an analogy at the national level: What if every voter in the United States was allowed to cast a ballot for Ohio’s senate candidates? How beholden would those senators be to Ohio?
It’s a fair point. But at the city level, at least the district would have a designated representative on city council, which is not the case now, and at the end of the day, that council member has to go home to live among the residents of his district.
The committee also proposed that a new system be used to appoint people to fill council vacancies that occur when a member leaves before the term is up. At present, council chooses a replacement. The criticism is that this gives the replacement the advantages of incumbency and party financial support when it comes time to run for reelection. Council chooses like-minded individuals who will ensure that the council remains an exclusive club, impenetrable to outsiders.
The review committee proposes that council appoint replacements with the understanding that the replacements won’t run in the next election … unless council finds that the prohibition on re-election would not be in the city’s best interests. That’s a loophole big enough to drive a truck through. Nor is it clear how the replacement could be denied the right to run for the seat.
Increasing the size of council by two makes sense, since the city has grown tremendously since the seven-member council was established in 1914, when the city had about a fifth of its current population, which is approaching 900,000.
But Sinnott raises one other objection to the proposal: It doesn’t address money. Campaign-finance reports for mayor and city council candidates (http:// bit.ly/2loBXNp) make it clear what really makes it tough to unseat incumbents in Columbus: A well-heeled network of developers, lobbyists and major businesses blows away challengers with a blizzard of campaign donations. Absent an antiincumbent uprising among voters, that wall of cash is a formidable obstacle.