Austin voters likely to see 13 proposed charter changes on November ballot

AUSTIN (KXAN) — When you go to vote for president in November, you’re also likely to see roughly a dozen proposed city charter changes. Austin City Council worked through ballot language on those proposed changes last week.

“The city charter is the Constitution for Austin, it’s the thing that sets up how our government works,” explained Brian Smith, a professor of political science at St. Edward’s University.

Some of the changes are procedural, aligning the city of Austin with state and federal rules. But there are also some operational changes proposed that you should know about before you vote.

Those include: making it more difficult to get a city council member recalled, giving city council control over who serves as city attorney and moving citizen-initiated elections (think the police oversight act or camping ban) to more well-attended election dates.

“We looked at when those elections should occur and decided to have a November process so that it’s more representative,” said Council Member Ryan Alter. He was behind the initial charter review process.

What to expect

At Austin City Council’s August meeting, they’ll finalize and order the election. City council is also expected to make some changes that do not require voter approval. That said, there are still quite a few charter-related propositions you’ll need to look at come November.

“They’re going to see a really long ballot, we did put a number of amendments on the ballot and it’s going to start with Prop C,” Alter said.

City council voted to start with Prop C because Austinites have seen a number of A and B propositions on their ballots over the last few years. It will make research of those propositions less confusing.

Here’s the ballot language adopted by council last week:

• Proposition C: Shall the City Charter be amended to clarify that the Independent Citizens Redistricting Commission (ICRC) is independent of City Council control, allow the ICRC to review City districts after changes to the City’s boundary lines, provide an effective date for the redistricting plan adopted by the ICRC, increase the number of individuals in the pool of potential appointees to the ICRC, clarify the method and timing of filling vacancies on the ICRC, and allow City staff to communicate with the ICRC outside of a meeting as long as such communication is in compliance with the Texas Open Meetings Act?
• Proposition D: Shall the City Charter be amended to delete language providing that the City Council shall meet at least once each week?
• Proposition E: Shall the City Charter be amended to delete language requiring the City Council to determine its rules and order of business by ordinance?
• Proposition F: Shall the City Charter be amended to clarify the meaning of the term “election” and to provide that the contribution and expenditure limits shall be modified each year by January 1st instead of with the adoption of the budget in order to align the City’s practice with federal and state practice?
• Proposition G: Shall the City Charter be amended to provide that initiative elections and citizen initiated charter amendment elections must be held on the next available November election date that occurs in an even-numbered year and that allows sufficient time to comply with other requirements of law?
• Proposition H: Shall the City Charter be amended to provide that a petition for an election to recall a City Council member other than the mayor must contain valid signatures of at least 15% of qualified voters of the respective Council district, instead of the current 10%, and to clarify that the affidavit on the recall petition must be signed by a petition circulator rather than by a person who signed the petition?
• Proposition I: Shall the City Charter be amended to provide that the city council appoints and may remove the city attorney?
• Proposition J: Shall the City Charter be amended so that the time frame for the resign-to-run provision for municipal court judges is the same as that provided in the Texas Constitution for other officials?
• Proposition K: Shall the City Charter be amended to ensure that city financial practices are consistent with generally accepted accounting principles, reflect current practices for appropriations for department-level work programs, and reflect best practices in contract execution authority and competitive bidding procedures consistent with state law for local government procurement, and also be amended to increase the annual amount of contracted expenditures the city manager may approve without Council approval?
• Proposition L: Shall the City Charter be amended to remove appointees and employees of the office of the city auditor from the classified civil service?
• Proposition M: Shall the City Charter be amended to remove the requirement that an individual must submit an affidavit to provide notice to the City of a claim of death, personal injury, or damaged or destroyed property and to align the claim notice deadline with state law?
• Proposition N: Shall the City Charter be amended to make non-substantive corrections of typographical errors, punctuation, and sentence structure and to change or remove charter language that is moot or is unenforceable because it has been superseded by state law or by a final court order?
• Proposition O: Shall the City Charter be amended to remove the restriction that officeholders must wait until after leaving office in order to solicit and accept political contributions to pay unpaid campaign expenses or to reimburse campaign expenditures made from personal funds?

“The problem, of course of these elections is they’re what we call low salience elections, they’re nonpartisan, there aren’t a lot of interest groups involved, they’re going to be at the very end of the ticket after we both for federal state and other local races. So a lot of times people ignore these, but they do have a lot of impact in the day to day lives,” Smith said.

What didn’t make the cut

The most contentious city charter change the city council considered last week will not make your ballot. That change called to increase the number of signatures required for citizen-initiated petitions to get to voters.

Right now in the city of Austin, that magic number is 20,000 registered voters. It will stay that way for now.

Several groups, including some who have successfully gotten citizen-initiated petitions to a ballot, raised concerns about that possible change to 3.5% of Austin voters instead of 20,000 signatures. City council decided not to move forward with that possible change.

“Ultimately, when it came to the council, we felt like it was not something that rose to really have that level of division. And I think we will have the same goal accomplished by moving elections to November,” Alter said.

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