Charter Amendment Proposals Bring Robust Discussion to June 13 Council Meeting

Many East Lansing residents, including two former mayors, attended Tuesday’s City Council meeting to voice their opinions on three proposed changes to the city charter. The Council is expected to take the matter up again on Tuesday, July 11.

The charter changes under consideration would (1) switch the City Council election cycle from odd-numbered years to even, (2) increase the number of members on Council from five to seven and (3) create a two-month lame duck period following the November Council elections. 

If a majority of Council decides to move one or more of these proposals to the ballot, East Lansing voters will decide the matters in November. The proposals could also be amended prior to being approved by Council.

Council will need to make decisions soon. Interim City Clerk Marie Wicks explained the ballot initiatives would need to be certified by the city and county clerks by mid-August to get on the November ballot. Before that can happen, the state Attorney General and Governor’s offices must review the proposals. 

City Attorney Anthony Chubb said voting on the changes at the June 20 Council meeting would give proper time for that review to take place, if Council is in favor of the changes. Council is now planning to take up the matter again on July 11.

While Council did not take action on the proposals this week, members did share their thoughts and reacted to the substantial community feedback.

“I agreed with all the points [made] and I appreciate the robust discussion,” Wicks said to ELi after the meeting. 

Two former East Lansing mayors spoke out against changing the charter.

Former mayors Liz Schweitzer and Diane Goddeeris used the public comment portion of the meeting to voice their opposition to changing the city charter as proposed, particularly with regard to shifting council elections to even years. 

Schweitzer, who served for 12 years on Council, said now is not the time to be making changes to the city charter and said Council should be working toward stability.

“Given the huge loss of longtime, experienced city staff in recent months, I believe your focus should be on rebuilding the confidence that this community has lost in its leadership,” she said. “Your lack of explaining your new direction is extremely troublesome.”

“I strongly suggest you spend your energies as a council getting out into the community to invite comment from the many who are expressing their strong disillusionment in what we see as the disintegration of what we have built over the years,” Schweitzer went on to say. 

Goddeeris agreed now is not the time to be making radical changes to the city charter. 

“Please do not rush something as important as this during a two-meeting review in the summer,” she said. She added if Council wants to make many changes to the charter, they should move to establish a charter review committee and undertake the process carefully.

Goddeeris also said she opposes changing the number of council members because it has worked for years and there hasn’t been any notable outcry from the community to make the switch. 

“Until we find that there is really a need, why are we doing that?” she asked. 

She also said the charter amendment to shift Council from five to seven members as proposed does not include changes to other sections of the charter that it would impact. For example, the charter currently states a quorum is three members and three votes are needed to adopt an ordinance. This would not even be a majority on a seven-member council. 

Chubb said this was a good catch, and then explained additional changes that would take place to accommodate the charter update would be made clear at the next meeting. 

Additionally, he said the attorney general’s review includes looking over the entire city charter. 

Chubb said he did not think the number of changes being proposed would trigger the state’s requirement for a charter review committee, but he suggested he would look into that.

Goddeeris also said she opposes the change to even-year elections. She said the elections currently take place at a time when residents pay close attention to the races, as the Council election is not competing for attention with state and national races. 

“Our choices for leaders aren’t buried at the end of the ballot,” Goddeeris said. 

A change in state law might make it necessary to create a lame-duck period.

Wicks explained to Council that the charter amendment to change the swearing-in date for council members from the first meeting following the election to the first Tuesday after Jan. 1 of the following year could be necessary to allow for canvassing to certify the election. 

She said this is a response to the passage of Proposal 2 in the 2022 election that requires ballots received within six days after the election from military and overseas voters be counted before certification. Additionally, the canvassing of the election will likely be extended from 14 days to 30 days. Canvassing involves two Democrats and two Republicans going through each precinct to ensure everything was “balanced” in the election.

The objective of the charter amendment proposal is to ensure the swearing-in of new council members and election of the mayor happens after the elections are certified.

Chubb said the concern is new members could be sworn in without a certified election result, especially if a race is close. This would mean the city would need to ignore the charter to swear in members at the next meeting, or ignore state law and not allow time for the election to be certified. 

“I would add that in recent memory, I think that we had a very close election, separation of maybe one or two votes,” Wicks said, referring to the election where Mark Meadows and Erik Altmann wound up two votes apart. “It’s very critical obviously that we have those final results before we are having the election for mayor and are swearing in city council members.”

The intention of the charter amendment is not to create a lame duck session, but that would be a side effect. Responding to a question from Councilmember Dana Watson, Wicks said some people worry about lame duck sessions because departing council members could be making decisions without accountability. 

Mayor Pro Tem Jessy Gregg seemed to be in favor of the change. She said she thinks it’s good for newly elected officials to be able to “pause for breath” before they are sworn in following a busy campaign season. She said being on Council is difficult and suggested it would be good to have a substantial break between being elected and starting work.

Gregg said there are very few Council meetings scheduled in late November and December anyway.

But Council can be convened out of the regular schedule with just 18 hours of public notice given. Lame-duck councils could approve site plans, enter into contracts, and more – and that’s the nature of the concern expressed by critics.

In comments to Council on the matter, resident Chris Root said, “I would be really surprised if folks are sitting around at their dining room tables saying, ‘I would really like one more of those legislative bodies that I elect to have lame-duck sessions when some of the members that I elect have no accountability to voters anymore.’ I don’t think that’s something people are yearning for. I don’t think that’s an improvement in the way that you do business. I think accountability ultimately is by election and if people who are no longer going to hold the office then have almost two months to keep passing laws, I think that’s a bug in our system, not something that is beneficial.”

Root said Council should move to change the charter to require swearing-in as early as possible. 

The charter could be changed to read something along the lines of requiring swearing-in on the first Tuesday after certification, with national holidays excluded.

Two 2020 resignations and broader representation were named as reasons justifying two additional seats on Council.

The second charter amendment discussed would increase the number of members on Council from five to seven. 

Mayor Ron Bacon said this idea was initially raised following the resignations of former Mayor Ruth Beier and Councilmember Mark Meadows at a meeting in 2020, which left Council with just three members. 

In fact, this idea has been bandied about in political conversations many times in the past.

Bacon also said council members have had to make major sacrifices in their personal lives and battle through health issues to attend meetings to try to reach quorum (three members). He also said adding council members would allow for broader representation and community engagement. With a council of seven, quorum would require four members present.

“We’ve brushed up against quorum too many times and probably sometimes the public couldn’t even see it because people made some huge concessions to be present,” he said. 

Gregg and Bacon said adding a member will also allow for better support for boards and commissions. 

“The strength of Council is having broader expertise in different members of the community,” Bacon said. 

Gregg added some important agenda items have been pushed to later meetings because Council knows it will be missing members. She said three people are too few to decide some of the things Council votes on. 

Concerns about uninformed and “unwilling” voters and campaign costs lay at the center of the conversation regarding moving Council elections to even years.

The most controversial proposition discussed by Council was the charter amendment that would move City Council elections from odd-numbered years to even. 

The move would allow the elections to coincide with state and federal elections and would result in a significant increase in people voting in City Council elections, because they would come to the ballot for bigger races. (Today, Council elections are often the only thing on the ballot in odd-numbered years, which means those who vote do so because they’re interested in the council.) If passed, the new rule would go into effect in 2026 and extend the terms of members on Council by a year to accommodate that change. 

One specific group of voters was singled out in the conversation: students. As things stand now, student turnout is extremely low for Council elections, even though any registered voter can participate in the election. However, as was evident by long lines on MSU’s campus and at the City Clerk’s office during the 2020 and 2022 elections, students can be a major force in elections when they show up. 

“The students of East Lansing not only delivered the State of Michigan, they also delivered the nation with their votes,” Bacon said, apparently referring to recent national elections. “I don’t fear the student vote.” 

He also said all groups of voters have people making uninformed decisions and that isn’t a trait exclusive to students. 

One argument made during public comment was that many students would be less educated on city elections than the people who currently vote for Council. Other speakers said more student voters would make elections more representative of the city’s population and amount to a change for the better. 

Watson also spoke in favor of working to increase student voter turnout because of all the decisions Council makes that impact young people. 

“They are representing their generation,” she said. “They are exercising their right to vote, as they should… Giving them the opportunity to more deeply capture their thoughts on our city council makeup sounds like a great decision to me.”

Councilmember George Brookover pointed out that students who want to vote are allowed to now. They just have to show up for elections on odd-numbered years. 

He also said moving elections to even years would increase campaign costs. 

If uninformed voters rely on name recognition, as some speakers suggested, that would increase the importance of marketing, as candidates for state and federal office would also be trying to get their name out. 

Brookover thinks these increased costs could decrease student involvement in city government, as it could make it more difficult for a student to afford a campaign. 

“These will be incredibly expensive elections,” he said. “I think right now, the ballpark for an election for City Council if you’re running a real election is 10 to 15 thousand dollars. That’s multiplied by three from when it was maybe 15 years ago… If somebody’s really going to try to run a city council election at the end of a ballot, that’s a huge ballot in an even year, I suspect and predict that the cost of that election–minimum cost–would be $25,000.”

Brookover said the cost would also drive out regular volunteer citizens, a belief Goddeeris expressed earlier in the meeting. 

East Lansing City Council campaigns that raise a lot of money typically do so through PAC (political action campaign) donations and large donations from people likely to have business before Council. For example, former mayor Aaron Stephens, who was elected to Council as an undergraduate student, had his campaign significantly bolstered by the Greater Lansing Realtors’ PAC, which spent over $32,000 on Stephens’ campaign. 

That money made it possible for Stephens to advertise heavily. He ultimately beat out incumbent Susan Woods.

Bacon suggested, in his remarks, that having elections on even-numbered years would increase the chances of young people getting elected. 

East Lansing has a history of electing and then promoting young people on to mayorships. Before Stephens – who was on the Council that appointed Bacon and Watson – Nathan Triplett was elected to Council the year after he graduated from MSU and Sam Singh was elected to Council at age 24. Triplett and Singh were both subsequently elected mayor.

Answering questions about costs, Wicks said moving Council elections to even-numbered years would save the city money. The 2021 elections cost just over $61,000. However, Wicks said, cost is secondary when considering the large implications of moving the elections. 

“In my opinion, cost is not the driver for this, based on what I’m hearing and what I’m sensing,” Wicks told ELi following the meeting. 

Wicks provided ELi with data showing that, in the last Council election (2021), a total of 4,704 voters participated. Of those, a total of 36 people voted at the campus precincts.

Alice Dreger contributed reporting.

UPDATE: This article was updated on June 16 to reflect the new information from City Clerk Marie Wicks that Council will take the matter up again not at the June 20 meeting but at the July 11 meeting.