WEDNESDAY, Oct. 23 — Lansing city charter review commissioners voted last night to retain the existing strong mayor form of government before heatedly debating the ideal size and makeup of the City Council.
The nine members voted unanimously to maintain the strong mayor form. It marks the first vote the body has taken on whether to change the charter since it was elected in May. Until now, its activities have been largely discussion and procedural decisions. The commission will eventually recommend reforms to the governor. If they are approved, then Lansing voters will decide on any changes to the 46-year-old charter.
The vote came with little discussion. That's because the issue was debated at length at its Sept. 24 session. It was clear at that meeting that the commission was going to recommend staying with a strong-mayor system. As Commissioner Jody Washington put it, "Without that, there are no checks and balances."
Commissioner Joan Bauer said then that her sense of the community, based on conversations with voters, was they preferred a strong mayor, who is directly elected, as opposed to a Council-appointed mayor, which is the most common alternative.
"Almost all of them want the ability to vote their mayor in or out, and they're a little reticent about having the City Council hire a mayor,” Bauer said Sept. 24. The last was a reference to employing a city manager to run the executive branch of city government, which often accompanies a Council-chosen mayoral system.
“People want their voices to be heard, and I personally want to elect the CEO of the city of Lansing,” Commissioner Lori Adams Simon said at the Sept. 24 meeting.
In voting to retain a strong mayor system in the city charter, many commissioners noted that they’d still like to narrow the qualifications and better define the role of the mayor’s executive assistant.
Commission Chair Brian Jeffries said the vote would not impact their ability to rework the executive assistant role’s function.
Commissioner Guillermo Lopez reiterated his desire to look more closely at the executive assistant position.
“In my 30 years of service in the city, we’ve had any number of chief executives,” Lopez said, adding that the position has had different titles under different mayors. “I think we should stick to one and have some sort of job description.”
Adams Simon agreed but moved for a vote on the motion to stick with a strong mayor with the understanding that the executive assistant’s role could be redefined as they proceed with the rewrite process.
The discussion followed a presentation by Mark Skidmore, a Michigan State University professor of state and local government policy, and his student assistant, Pei-Jyun Lu.
Skidmore collected data on comparable cities, their forms of government and Council makeups. In their research, the pair found that “cities frequently change forms of government,” Skidmore said.
“Right now, over the past 30 or 40 years, we have steadily moved to a council-manager form,” he said, referring to what commissioners would later vote against. In it, the City Council selects a member as mayor who leads the Council, which hires a city manager and delegates responsibility to that person for operating the city. About 59% of U.S. cities fall under that definition.
Skidmore said that form “has really gained traction over the years,” especially in higher-income cities.
“One possible explanation is that there's greater confidence in the higher-income cities that they felt like they could have a handle on what's happening and can monitor their manager,” he said.
However, he added, a city manager is also typically linked to higher administrative costs. Meanwhile, a strong mayor form, as Lansing has, “can be more political and is characterized as less efficient.” One benefit is that a strong mayor in a capital city may be able to more effectively negotiate with state officials.
He pointed out an alternative to a strong mayor vs. a city manager system.
“The hybrid system is a mixture of them, where, for example, the mayor may hire a chief administrative officer to manage daily operations,” he said, adding that Lansing falls very near that definition.
Skidmore also offered an overview of City Council configurations that included data from other comparable capital cities. Lansing’s eight Council seats break down to about 14,000 people represented by each member, which he said was “in the middle among all the communities we looked at of similar size.”
Outliers include Tallahassee, which has around 200,000 people and just five Council members. Nashville has 41 to represent roughly 700,000.
Lansing’s eight-member Council has an equal number elected by ward and at-large. Skidmore noted that at-large seats “tend to be less political,” while a greater number of ward seats would be “more political.”
“With City Council size, smaller city councils, I think, can be a little easier to make decisions, but there's better representation with larger city councils,” he added.
Washington followed up on a previous request she’d made to have “someone from the city” provide mock-up maps of what seven or nine wards would look like.
City Clerk Chris Swope, who oversees city elections, replied that the responsibility of drawing new boundaries falls to the City Council. Without that input, he said, “there are infinite ways” new wards could be configured.
Commissioner Liz Boyd noted that she wasn’t keen on moving toward primarily ward-based seats because Lansing’s population has decreased from 133,000 to about 112,000 since the existing charter was approved in 1978.
“We are a smaller city. We should keep the four wards, and we should go to three at large Council people. That would take us to seven Council people. I think that it would be the right size,” Boyd said.
Washington, a former City Council member, disagreed, saying that the present wards “are much too large,” leading to less representation per resident. She also railed against “big money” in local elections.
“The at-large positions are bought and paid for by special interest groups. It has become cost prohibitive to run for an at-large position if you don't have the Chamber of Commerce and the unions to pay for you. It is now between $50,000 and $70,000,” she said.
In underrepresented parts of the city, she added, residents may not be able to afford that. “But they could certainly go door-to-door if they were smaller wards.”
Commissioner Muhammad Qawwee provided a counterpoint.
“It is expensive, but we're still electing the best members for that position. You can say that the money is swaying that, but I think we're underestimating our voters. They look at who is going to be best for that job whether they have money backing them or not. So, just to lash out at the unions and the chamber, I think, is not appropriate,” he said.
Jeffries also took a moment to address Washington.
“I take great exception to your comments as it relates to at-large council members getting bought and sold. I've been an at-large member for 12 years prior to this time, and I was never bought and sold by anybody,” he said.
On the suggestion that at-large members don’t pull their weight, he asked members to think back on the last 25 years.
“With Council members, who's the GOAT — the greatest of all time — Council member during the last quarter century? Who’s always responded to the constituents and who always did the hard work? It was Carol Wood,” he said. “And, oh my God, she's an at-large Council member. How can that be?”
“If you go down to seven members, three at large, you still have four majority votes to get the issue done. But I will not support taking votes away from the people,” Jeffries concluded.
“I'm not going to take any tongue lashings from you. I have the right to my opinion,” Washington said.
“No one said you didn’t,” Jeffries replied.
Commissioner Jazmin Anderson tried to clear the air.
“All nine of us chose different paths, and it worked,” Anderson said. “We’re all here. You can have an issue with the choosing to be involved in the elections the way they do, without it being a personal attack on who they chose to endorse.
“So, I don't think that Washington is personally attacking you guys for being endorsed by the chamber. She doesn't like the way that the chamber is operating and how they're choosing to engage.”
Anderson added that plenty of Council members are already responsive to issues in other wards, citing the First Ward’s Ryan Kost and Adam Hussain of the Third Ward.
Commissioner Ben Dowd said he experienced what he believed to be “special interests” when he applied to fill a vacant seat in the First Ward in 2022. City Council members tapped Brian Daniels for the spot, but Kost defeated him at the polls.
“I would still stand to say, to this day, that I was the top candidate in the room, and I showed up feeling pretty good on the final night. But it was very obvious in the conversations that that decision was made with other areas of the city, ahead of the vote that happened,” Dowd said. “It didn't matter what happened or who showed up. That decision was made outside of that Council meeting with special interests through other departments of the city.”
While he supports having fewer at-large seats, Dowd added, he feels the commission should address how money impacts elections in the new charter.
The chamber endorsed six out of the nine commissioners when they ran last May in a special election: Bauer, Jeffries, Lopez, Boyd, Qawwee and Dowd. Anderson was a member of a competing slate, the Lansing Community Alliance. Adams Simon, and Washington were the only members not endorsed by either.
“I was told you can't beat a slate. I did,” Adams Simon said. “The thing about being endorsed is that they didn't tell anybody not to go out and vote, they didn't tell anybody to sit at home. So, as citizens of Lansing, we have to be responsible and make sure that we go to vote. We need to move away from this negativity amongst ourselves and do the work that we're elected to do.”
Bauer said she prefers a mix of City Council seats.
“I still think that that balance is extremely important,” she said. “But I’m very concerned about the cost of elections. I don't know that we could do anything in the charter, but we do need to be very aware of that.”
The commission will delay its next meeting from two weeks to three because of the election. Their next meeting is set for Nov. 12 and will include a presentation by the Lansing Board of Water & Light.
Swope also updated members on the commission budget. He said it has spent $137,098 and has $362,091 remaining.
Support City Pulse - Donate Today!
Comments
No comments on this item Please log in to comment by clicking here