Don’t change Cedar Rapids City Council setup, says Charter Review Commission

CEDAR RAPIDS - The city should continue to have a nine-member City Council, with five members elected in districts and four, including the mayor, elected by voters throughout the city, the Charter Review Commission decided last night.

Commission members noted that citizens have suggested - both at a public forum last week and through written input and one-to-one contacts - a variety of different council makeups, including five-member or seven-member councils, councils with fewer or no districts and councils in which districts are defined by quadrant or other geographic boundary. State law requires districts to have similar populations, which prevents defining districts solely by geography.

In quick order, commission members rejected such suggestions and voted to keep the current council structure in place, which was created by the city's Home Rule Charter Commission in 2005 and approved by voters in June 2005.

Commission member Scott Overland said the city's charter was still too new for a “major change” such as changing the seat makeup of the council.

Commission member Nancy Welsh complimented the original Charter Commission for backing a district plan that allowed the city to “break” away from seeing itself only in terms of quadrants.

Former Mayor Kay Halloran, who is co-chairperson of the Charter Review Commission, said the original commission's decision to create a council with five district seats and four at-large ones nicely captured the “peculiar” political landscape of Cedar Rapids.

“I didn't hear a compelling reason to change it,” commission member Carl Whiting added of the current nine-member council setup.

Some who attended last week's public forum suggested that the Charter Review Commission find a way to better stagger the election of the nine council seats. Currently, six members are elected in one cycle, and two years later, three members are elected. All serve four-year terms.

The 6-3 stagger is particularly problematic, commission member Robin Tucker argued, because the cycle in which three seats are up for a vote - as is the case in 2011 - consists of the election of one at-large seat and the election of the District 2 and District 4 seats. As a result, residents in Districts 1, 3 and 5 will vote for only one council seat this year.

Tucker proposed that the five district council seats be converted to two-year terms, an arrangement that would have eight council seats up for election in one cycle, six in the next.

Tucker thought two-year terms would attract more people to run for office who might not want to commit to a four-year term.

The city's previous form of government elected five commissioner/council members every two years, which some argued back in 2005 put elected officials in constant campaign mode.

Whiting noted that the simplest way to improve the current imbalance in the council stagger might be to shift one of the three at-large seats now elected in the year in which six seats are on the ballot to the year in which only three council seats are now on the ballot.

Commission member Nancy Bruner noted that some citizens expressed concern that those who win one of the three seats up for election this year can run for mayor two years from now, lose and retain their council seats for the final two years of their four-year terms. Those in the five council seats on the ballot in the year of the mayor's race don't have the same luxury, Tucker noted.

The Charter Review Commission will continue its discussion of the stagger issue and term lengths at its meeting next Thursday at 5:30 p.m. at the city's temporary city hall.

The commission is slated to make recommendations to the City Council by August.

Last night, the commission also unanimously approved the current charter's compensation guidelines for council members. In 2005, the salary was set at $15,000 per year for council members and $30,000 for mayor with yearly cost-of-living raises, which have taken place each year since 2006.