East Lansing Charter Review Committee Members Urge Council to Advance Amendments

Over the course of 19 meetings held in 2024 and 2025, the East Lansing Charter Review Committee examined the city’s 119-year-old foundational document. Now, as the City Council deliberates how to address the committee’s 29 recommended changes, East Lansing Info spoke with three members of the committee about what comes next.

Recommendations made by the seven-member committee include adding a preamble to the charter, requiring future city managers to live within 25 miles of the city and making language gender-neutral. Voters will need to approve amendments before they are enshrined in the charter. At recent City Council meetings, council has discussed spreading the amendments out across several elections, a direction that has frustrated the three committee members who spoke with ELi.

While Councilmember Mark Meadows said at a January meeting that the amendments are mostly straightforward and could be divided between two ballots, City Attorney Steven Joppich advised the council to space out the amendments over several elections, citing the possibility of voter fatigue and the constraints of a two-sided ballot.

At the Feb. 10 City Council meeting, Joppich suggested the city start voting on amendments by placing three on both the August and November ballots, with the rest of the amendments to be spread out across elections in 2027. Joppich cited concerns from the city clerk’s office about sending out a two-page ballot as a reason for the approach.

Committee Vice Chair Jeff Hank told ELi he believes the amendments belong together on as few ballots as possible.

“They’re comprehensive and should be considered together,” he said. “They’re not so complicated that East Lansing voters can’t consider them in pieces over time. I just think that’s the best way to handle the change. Some of the changes are overdue and necessary, so the handful that might need a little more thought and discussion — there’s time to do that. The task should be to make that happen in time so these all go on the November ballot, which is the highest-turnout ballot, and give adequate time to explore any of that.”

Committee Member Ruben Martinez agreed, saying the committee thought the process might require two elections. However, he said the city’s new attorney categorized the amendments into three groups — required, legally neutral and inadvisable — at the request of Mayor Erik Altmann. Joppich identified three proposals about transparency and adding a preamble to the charter as needing further investigation, which could add time to the process.

But Martinez said the council should not underestimate the electorate.

“They can probably add a few more to those three if they parse them out so that the easy or noncomplicated ones are grouped appropriately and use some sort of hierarchy to include them,” Martinez said.

“I understand there’s a lot here, but Lansing got through some complicated ones. I’m not sure we shouldn’t proceed with maybe at most three elections — something like 10 at a time.”

Pam Weil, also a member of the Charter Review Committee, said she does not understand why Joppich has been asked to dissect the group’s work. She said several lawyers — including the city’s former legal counsel — were on the committee or sat in at meetings, vetting the wording of each recommendation.

“There were maybe hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of legal hours that went into that work — most of it pro bono, because we had lawyers on the committee as members,” she said. “Compared to Lansing, I can’t think of anything radical. It was a very East Lansing-type group. The most riled up we got was over the preamble — it basically said, ‘We’re not jerks.’ Everything else is pretty much boilerplate and corrections that were left over from previous changes — that sort of unexciting thing.”

Weil said she feels the way City Council has discussed the committee’s work is offensive and that every document was reviewed or generated with legal input.

Her advice: “Either read it and pass it, or don’t.”

Hank agreed, saying the council has a history of creating committees and commissions but not listening to them. He also said the council could invite members to attend a meeting to help with discussion of certain recommendations but has not.

“I think the members of the committee all worked very hard,” Martinez said. “We took the existing charter section by section over a period of time and discussed everything in great depth. There was not a great deal of contentiousness about any of it. We discussed things in very civil and rational ways.

“Ultimately, I think the watchword in our minds was transparency,” Martinez said. “We want local government to be transparent, and we want residents of the city to have access to governmental activities, functions and decisions.”

A quote was corrected post-publication.