Here’s a fuller version of that earlier story about Council moving forward with a modified term limits proposal.
You can almost set your watch by it.
Mayor Annise Parker is in her third and final term, which means it is time for the cycle that has repeated roughly every six years since voters imposed term limits on City Hall in 1991: City Council is discussing asking voters to change those term limits.
This loop started with the late Bob Lanier, whom voters first elected as mayor the same year they chose to cap city officials’ tenures in office, for the first time, at six years: three terms of two years each.
Lanier started as a supporter of term limits, but as his departure approached in 1997 – and his backers pushed a bill in the Legislature to let him stay longer – his stance switched. Both local and state efforts to let him stick around came to naught, however.
Lanier was succeeded by Lee Brown, who pledged to pursue term-limit changes during his final stint in office but didn’t make much progress.
Brown’s successor, Bill White, was careful not to push term-limits reform as he eyed a run for governor, but he did form a commission to study the issue. That group’s recommendations were forwarded in 2010 to City Council. The body failed to place them before voters, concerned that the proposal, by allowing some incumbents to serve longer than six years, would appear self-serving.
These late-term mayoral pushes ignore still other times that City Council members or influential business leaders and political insiders discussed but ultimately dropped plans to push for term-limit changes – most commonly, to switch to two four-year terms – in 1997, 1999, 2001, 2004 and 2012.
Whether 2015 will be added to that list of dates when talk of reform fizzled is up to City Council, which is in the process of discussing reforms to the city charter, including term limits.
See here for the earlier story. I don’t really have much to add to this, I’d just forgotten that Mayors Lanier and Brown had taken a shot at changing the ordinance as well. And I’ll never understand the allure – from the public’s perspective, anyway – of four year terms. I’m in wait-and-see mode for now. Campos has more.