The Prop A committee has voted on some rules for handling agenda items put forth by three or more Council members in accordance with last year’s referendum.
The vote comes after months of arguments between council members and Mayor John Whitmire’s administration surrounding how the historic charter change would play out in practice. The newly established rules include multiple council member amendments that ensure feedback in the proposal crafting process, and also insurance that items won’t die in committee.
It isn’t the last stop for the rules – they will be voted on by city council at a later meeting.
Shortly after he took office, Whitmire created the Proposition A Committee designed to aid council members in crafting policy by having a mechanism to vet proposals before they made it on a meeting agenda. But council members have argued the committee has wrapped the process in unnecessary red tape and violates the true intention of the rule change.
Council members will now have the option to submit their proposals directly to the council or send them to the Proposition A Committee. The proposal will then be subject to a legal review.
When the committee last floated rules in April, council members were concerned about the undue influence in the proposal process since both the city attorney’s office and department heads report directly to the mayor. The administration has maintained it will cooperate with council members on proposals.
If a proposal goes to the committee, members can now vote to send it to a council agenda, refer it to the administration that can then involve relevant department heads and legal before sending it to another committee for a vote, or downvote the proposal.
A downvote on a proposal means the item will not be heard by the committee again, but it can be rewritten and heard again, the committee’s chair Mary Nan Huffman said.
See here for the previous update. I was a skeptic of Prop A when it was first proposed – I still think that the three-member threshold for putting an item on the agenda has the potential to encourage shenanigans, though this has not been the experience so far – but now that it has been passed I agree that the spirit of the ordinance cuts against procedural obstacles for it. I appreciate that the committee is keeping it simple here and that the bias is towards allowing items to proceed. (I’m not sure why anyone would submit their item to the committee if they have the option of bypassing it, but perhaps there’s some nuance here that’s not conveyed by the story.) It should not be the case that a proposed ordinance that is deemed to be legal can be bottled up in the committee.
The rules put forth here still need to be approved by Council, and I imagine there will be future tweaks made as we gain experience in dealing with it. For now we’re in a good place. I’ll be very interested to see how often Prop A is used and how often it results in an ordinance that we otherwise would not have had.