Committee recommends 3 city charter amendments

Changes appear on Nov. 2 ballot

Three amendments to Royal Oak’s city charter on the Nov. 2 ballot have been recommended by the city Charter Review Committee.

The changes come from the committee, which is chaired by Rob Moore.

First among the proposed amendments is a proposal to acknowledge that state law controls elections in Michigan.

Moore said the Royal Oak’s charter was written when the community incorporated as a city in 1921 and routinely requires updating to remove rules that are outdated or no longer legal.

“In general, state law would trump anything that’s in the city charter,” Moore said. “We’re just cleaning that up with this section of the charter that deals with elections.”

Since Royal Oak became a city a century ago, the election section in the city charter has been amended 28 times, he added.

The second proposed amendment allows the city assessor to appoint a designee to attend board of review meetings to represent the assessor.

Once a year review committee members reach out to city department heads to get their suggestions on the charter, including proposed amendments, Moore said.

City Assessor Jim Geiermann suggested the proposed amendment, which is a legal policy in use in other similar situations, Moore said.

The third proposed charter amendment is to eliminate the non-existent city public health department and health officer position.

“This is another one of those outdated positions,” Moore said. “The city outsourced health functions to the county health department in the early 1970s.”

Most cities the size of Royal Oak, with about 60,000 residents, typically outsource health matters to their home counties, he added

Charter Review Committee members include City Commissioner Sharlan Douglas and four other members at large, two of whom are attorneys.

Members of the committee meet regularly to ferret out sections of the charter that no longer

apply or are unconstitutional.

As an example, Moore noted that In 2017, voters approved striking out a charter requirement from 100 years ago that stated only residents who owned property could vote in city elections,

That same year, voters approved an amendment to make the charter gender neutral, because all language in the document referred to all city officials with male gender pronouns.

Voters approved eliminating another section of the charter that allowed only people 25 or older to seek city elective office.

Such a requirement has been found unconstitutional, and the minimum age to be elected to office in Royal Oak was lowered to 21, which is the same as the state law, except for the governor and lieutenant governor, who have to be at least 30.

Royal Oak’s city charter was not a completely new document when it was drafted and enacted in 1921, Moore said.

“They took a lot of (the language) from the old township charter of 1891,” he said.