New charter review commission proposed

Although the previous City Council didn’t take action on a 2019 special report on citizen initiatives from the Office of the City Auditor, the current Council appears likely to approve creation of a new citizens commission tasked with recommending changes to the city charter.

In particular, the potential new commission might consider whether the city should alter requirements for petitions to create ordinances. Council members are specifically interested in asking members of the commission to consider increasing the number of voters required to sign petitions to get proposed ordinances onto citywide ballots.

Council Member Ryan Alter is the lead sponsor of the resolution on this week’s agenda calling for establishment of a Charter Review Commission. His co-sponsors include Council members Natasha Harper-Madison, Alison Alter and Leslie Pool, as well as Mayor Pro Tem Paige Ellis and Mayor Kirk Watson.

There are four types of citizen-initiated petitions, but the commission is likely to focus on the requirements for putting a new ordinance on the ballot. The requirements for putting a charter amendment on the ballot are set by state law, so the city can’t change them.

According to the auditor’s report, “most peer cities require more signatures for citizen initiatives than Austin. Only Austin has a set number of signatures required in addition to a percentage requirement. To propose a new law, petitioners in Austin must collect either signatures from 20,000 voters or 5 percent of voters, whichever number is smaller. Twenty-thousand signatures is currently about 3 percent of Austin voters and will continue to be a lower percentage as the city grows.”

The report says that Houston requires 15 percent of the total votes cast for mayor at any city general election held within the three years preceding the date of a petition’s filing. Dallas requires 10 percent of qualified voters from the latest county voter registration list.

The last time Austin changed its requirements was in 2012. That year, a Charter Review Commission made several recommendations, including decreasing the percentage of voters needed for an ordinance to be put on the ballot from 10 percent of voters to 5 percent or 20,000 voters – whichever number is less. That was approved. Five percent is also the requirement to initiate a charter amendment under state law.

The group also recommended that the requirements for validating a recall petition be increased from 10 percent to 20 percent. However, that recommendation along with two housekeeping proposals did not make it onto the November 2018 ballot.

Ryan Alter told the Austin Monitor, “What we’re doing here is making the elections more representative. We’re asking the Charter Review Commission to give us a recommendation on these thresholds,” he said, “but right now 20,000 is a smaller and smaller sliver of the public, so we have the ability for a sliver of the public essentially to try to operate via a petition. We can’t have government by citizen initiative – even though they are an important part of the process,” he said, adding that the threshold for putting something on the ballot should be changed to be “more broadly representative of the community.”

He noted that there are two competing proposals on the May ballot related to police oversight. One, he said, was put forth by the progressive group Equity Action, while a second – which purported to be from the same group – was funded by a political action committee associated with the Austin Police Association. The two referendums will be on the May ballot.

Attorney Bill Aleshire sent a letter to the mayor and Council on Tuesday urging them not to increase the number of signatures required to put an ordinance on the ballot. “Several Democrats on the Austin City Council, rightfully, criticize Republicans for undermining the ability of voters to control their government,” Aleshire wrote in the letter. “Then, these Democrats turn right around, with unabashed hypocrisy, and do the same damned thing. Supporting an anti-democracy Austin City Charter amendment to make it even harder for voters to propose ordinances by initiative petition is an example of that hypocrisy.

“And it is stupid,” he wrote. “Austin City Charter, Article IV, section 1 says, ‘The people of the city reserve the power of direct legislation by initiative, and in the exercise of such power may propose any ordinance …’ Then, the Charter adopts that exact same standard for petitioning an ordinance as state law does for initiating a charter amendment. ‘Any initiated ordinance may be submitted to the council by a petition signed by qualified voters of the city equal in number to the number of signatures required by state law to initiate an amendment to this Charter,’” Aleshire’s letter said.

He also said that putting the charter amendment on the November ballot has no extra cost. But that’s not always an option because of rules governing timing of elections.

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