First is a outline of the steps that an idea could take on the way to becoming either a proposal of change to our City Charter or to becoming a member of unsupportable ideas that the Charter Commission will finally refer to the appropriate city organization to consider implementing.
This process starts with collected ideas which are voted on by the Commission to select those that will be Considered based on the material supplied by the persons who submitted the idea. If the Commission wants to Consider the idea, it triggers requests for pertinent data from MTAS and the City and places the idea on the next meeting agenda to accept this input.
At the next meeting, when this idea comes up on the agenda, the requested data is discussed, including perhaps input from the public since the idea was listed on the agenda. Based on this information from MTAS, the City and perhaps the public, the Commission then votes on whether this idea warrants further Review.
If so, it is placed on the next Public Hearing and the following regular meeting. Otherwise it joins other Unsupported ideas.
After hearing from citizens at the Public Hearing, the Commission takes up the Review of this idea, discusses all this input, determines acceptable wording and conducts the first of two Review votes on this idea which has now been transformed into a proposal. If it is still supported, it is placed on the next regular meeting agenda for a second Review reading and vote. This is the only time the Commission needs to spend any substantial time on this item.
At the second Review and vote, this proposal is considered for a final time and if still supported, it becomes a Proposal Pending Final Review where the Commission will take a last look at the approved proposals before submitting them to a referendum.
The ideas that are Unsupported can be refered to the appropriate City organization for possible consideration.
If you look at timeline of an example idea that becomes a proposal, you will notice that there are two major states. The first is the Consideration phase where other input beyond that from the submitters is evaluated. The second is the Review phase where additional public input is requested during a Public Hearing after which a proposal is formed and passes through two readings and votes.
The vertical green lines are votes on this idea/proposal. Vertical blue lines are the Public Hearings where this idea was first collected and where it was on the agenda of a subsequent Hearing. The intersections of the vertical meeting lines with the lower timeline shows when this idea is on a meeting agenda.
Any supported idea will have survived the Consider and the Review procedural votes and two Review votes of the final proposal based on this idea.
It also will be identified on four consecutive agendas including a Public Hearing where citizens are notified that this particular idea is being reviewed to become a proposed change to our City Charter. If any citizen cannot attend these meetings they can email the Commission or call them based on published information.
One final important point. In this timeline, we can consider the second Public Hearing, where this particular idea is listed on the agenda, shares that meeting with the collection of suggested changes to the next Article of the Charter to be considered. So these individual timelines for all the ideas that show any support overlap and are offset from each other and share time on any given meeting.
Tomorrow, I want to talk about how to easily implement this proposed process.
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