Council Work Session

I'm going to call to order today's meeting of the,
work session, sorry, for the Corvallis City Council and joint with
the Charter Review Task Force Phase Two.
Call to order. And I just want to start by welcoming our citizen members of the
phase two of our task force to review the charter.
I think this might be the first we've all been in the same
room.
Um, so I guess we'll dive in. We have our, our update to the rest of the
council. So let's just go ahead and get
started.
Start with presentations.
Presentations always seem to be the most
trouble.
So, just a little background on the Charter Review,
Phase Two Task Force formed in December twenty twenty-five when
the first phase of the Charter Review Task Force concluded its work.
Um, again, charged to evaluate form of government, charter provisions,
consider, additions to align with the legal organizations model charter and
other miscellaneous charter provisions.
Um, we-- So far, our work so far has been mainly focused, on the form of
government, due to the impact and effort required to
get them on the ballot, essentially.
These are the guiding principles that we adopted as for phase two of the Charter
Review Task Force. Um, to me, it's all kind of obvious things that
we should always do. Fair and effective representation, effective and efficient
legislative function, accountability to voters and democratic
responsiveness, continuity and, and institutional
stability, cost and administrative impact, long-term governance alignment, and
accessibility to elected leaders and public service.
I really felt that these things are core of
how we operate as a government and what, what the community
deserves. We-- Uh, so we've made a few-- have a few
recommendations for you. The first one is, lowering
our number of wards and councilors from nine to seven.
Uh, we actually had a really good discussion on this.
There were some, interesting suggestions of even or odd, but we
ended up with seven, to keep it odd, and that between,
councilors to be nominated and elected by ward as we currently
do.
We have the highlights there. Improved operational efficiencies, governmental
product-productivity, resources for councilors.
And I want to point out, it's interesting, I, I didn't think going from nine to
seven would make a big difference, but we've had a few meetings recently, we're
just down by one councilor, and it made a difference.
So it, it does show sometimes just
a little more focus instead of broader focus.
Um, it maintains the neighborhood identities, which is important to a lot of us,
geographic representation and accountability to wards.
As we know, Corvallis has some very unique areas, whether you live in the north
side or the south side or right in the middle, we want to maintain
that. But it pre-preserves the mayor's primary role as a facilitator and consensus
builder. We didn't want to make any changes to where I'd have a regular voter or
anything like that.
Um,
the considerations. Reduces opportunities to run for office, perception of
access to city. Um, mayor votes less frequently due to fewer tie
votes among odd number of councilors.
Even the wards only vote every four years, while odd votes--
ward votes vote every two years.
Oh.
That would be initially.
Yeah.
Something to be discussed.
Let's-
Yeah.
We can, maybe get into it a little bit more on the next slide, 'cause it has to
do when the mayor is elected.
Yeah. Um, at-large elections could allow representation
of a geographically spread interest group.
So we did discuss whether we wanted to have all councilors just be at large, like
some cities do. Um, and at-large elections of, two councilors per
ward could limit voter ability to, check and balance.
So again, we considered a lot of different models.
Um, city manager did talk a lot about, you know, you could have three
wards and still have six councilors. You can have one in one councilor per ward.
But what we ended up going with was those recommendations at the
top. Term limits. We suggested
four-year terms. Um, that way they could be staggered, so you wouldn't have
all, councilors come to ballot at once,
ideally. Um, odd wards would be elected in presidential election years and even
wards .
Uh,
again, this brings continuity, experience, focus on long-term goals,
development of positive relationships.
Um,
one of the challenges we, as we all experienced, we've been on council long
enough, is when a co-council has a big change, then we have a strategy that,
you know, hard to make-- fulfill. Uh,
it reduces the potential for significant turnover and loss of that institutional
knowledge. Again, when we're in the middle of our strategic
plan. Um, majority council, only refreshed every four
years due to odd numbers of councilors.
Even though odd wards, voter frequency, opportunities to run for mayor.
These are the things we really considered, is how do, how do these play out in
elections to where
everyone's kind of equal. And there was concerns
over the longer term may

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