Deadline looms for expansion vote
The clock is ticking for the Columbus City Council to decide if it will ask voters in November whether they want to expand the council and divide the city into districts while still electing members citywide.
The council needs to vote before its summer break at the end of July if the recommendations from a charter review committee appointed last year are to make the November ballot.
The council’s rules and reference committee had its first hearing on the proposal Wednesday.
“We don’t take these conversations lightly,” Councilman Shannon G. Hardin said. “We have conversations as a community and come up with our directions through open dialogue. This is the next step in that dialogue.”
Hardin said he supports putting the proposal on the ballot, but he wants to have more public hearings before asking council members to vote.
Hardin and Mayor Andrew J. Ginther appointed the committee last summer as voters considered a ballot issue that would have expanded the council to 13 seats, including 10 members elected by voters in districts. Voters overwhelmingly rejected that proposal at a special election that drew low turnout.
After months of deliberations and presentations, the committee recommended its own version: Expand the seven-member council to nine, divide the city into districts where members have to live and continue to elect them at-large.
Candidates would run against others in their district, but the entire city would vote in the race.
Similar systems are used in Tucson, Arizona, and Reno and Sparks, Nevada.
The city’s 835,000 residents would be divided into nine similarly sized districts to help answer questions about neighborhood representation, said Stephanie Coe, the committee’s chairwoman.
“To say you’re going to be represented by someone in your neighborhood, we need to be careful with our wording,” Councilwoman Priscilla
Tyson said. “A neighborhood of 100,000 people is not just one neighborhood.”
Council President Zach Klein said he’s concerned about developing a process for drawing district boundaries.
The charter-review committee also wants the council to adopt a policy to appoint new members to fill unexpired seats who will not run in the next election, unless it believes “that limitation would not be in the city’s best interest.”
Council members often are appointed to run with the advantage of incumbency in an upcoming election, though some recent council members have bucked that trend.
Advocates for the proposal say it continues to give Columbus voters a voice in electing every seat. Opponents have said it doesn’t go far enough to give neighborhoods representation.
Former state Rep. Bill Schuck, a Republican, said at Wednesday’s hearing that the proposal doesn’t go far enough in expanding the council.
Will Petrik, a council candidate representing Yes We Can Columbus, said the proposal is “a step in the right direction,” but should include true district elections where only the voters there have a say in their representative. He also wants the council to address campaign finance reform.
“This is mind-boggling to me that we’re having this conversation,” said Chip Moore, president of AFSCME Local 1632. “The ward system was on the ballot and it got defeated soundly.”