Council to decide on future of charter measure
Mayor Sylvester Turner on Wednesday promised to bring a charter amendment petition to City Council before a key August deadline to order an election for this year.
A diverse coalition of groups, including the Houston Professional Firefighters Association Local 341 and the Harris County Republican Party, delivered the petition in April, and the city secretary confirmed the signatures earlier this month. The measure would allow any three council members to place an item on the council agenda, a power almost entirely reserved for the mayor under the city’s strong-mayor format.
The council can put the charter amendment on the ballot this November or during the next city elections, which are in November 2023. Turner said he was not sure the city would order an election this year, prompting concern among petition organizers and supporters, who have sought an election in November. The last day to order an election for this year is Aug. 16.
“It will come before you, and this council will decide whether it goes on this year’s ballot or on the next city ballot,” Turner told his colleagues at the City Council meeting Wednesday. “I won’t be making that decision, we will be making that decision.”
The fire union is pushing a separate charter petition, which it delivered to City Hall last week, that would make binding arbitration the automatic resolution to contract impasses. The city and union have been in a deadlock since 2017 and have contested the contract talks in court battles.
Turner gave the firefighters a 6 percent raise this year and says he plans to do so in the next two years as well. City Council codi
fied those raises in an ordinance last month.
The mayor said the city has to decide if it is going to take each charter petition individually, or if it would be smarter to lump them together in a single election, “which, from a cost perspective, would be quite wise,” he said.
“What we will have to decide is whether or not you do these one at a time, and every time you put it out there it’s a cost to the city (to run the election),” Turner said. “Now, there’s another one that was just delivered to the city secretary (last) week… Let’s say that gets the requisite signatures, do we do another election on that one?”
The fate of the most recent petition from the fire union is less clear. Turner said it takes the city secretary an average of three months to count the signatures, even with added personnel the mayor says he has approved for their office. That would mean workers likely will not finish verifying them before the Aug. 16 deadline to order an election.
The union has alleged the city is slow-walking the count for the second petition. The Texas Election Code allows the city to use statistical sampling to verify the signatures, instead of vetting them individually, as the city is doing now.
When firefighters sought a charter amendment to get collective bargaining rights in 2003, the city used sampling to verify them. According to a city memo from then-City Secretary Anna Russell, the firefighters delivered the petition on Sept. 10, 2003, and the signatures were verified using sampling six days later, on Sept. 16.
Turner said he would not do that.
“We’re not changing from what we’ve done. We’re going to count them just like we counted the last one: We will count them as they come in,” Turner said. “That’s been the process I’ve used since I’ve been here. If I change the process, people will say I changed the process to meet certain purposes. We’re not going to change the process … We’re going to be consistent all the way through.”
When firefighters sought a charter amendment to get pay parity with police officers of equal rank and seniority in 2018, it took nearly a year for the city to verify the signatures. The union sued, and a court ordered the city secretary to verify them. The measure ultimately reached the ballot in 2019, and voters approved it, but a state court later ruled it unconstitutional.