MIN CHC PH 1999-06-16 - Laserfiche WebLink

Home

Charter review. We don't have any schedule on that right now. We'II just see how things move along. When we do come up with agreed upon proposed amendments, we'll have our legal staff work on the language to move those amendments forward and the proposed amendments will be voted on by the public, at the latest in the fall election of 2000 or if proposed, and we want to put it forward, we could entertain the possibility of a special election prior to that. But in any case, everything will be voted on to the general public. So that's where we are in the process. Tonight, if you want to testify, please fill in a Registration Form that we have on the desk up there. So far we have four people signed up to testify - five people and we will go through you one by one so please come up to the table and identify yourself. PUBLIC TESTIMONY RAY: The first person to testify, Jesse Dawn. Jesse. Jesse, you can sit if you want. There's no camera so make yourself comfortable. DAWN: Okay. There was a letter by Mr. Ray in the paper and also a report in the paper mentioning the possibility of the Commission entertaining the idea of doing away with the Office of Mayor and personally, I think this is strangely timed and - RAY: Can I interject one thing? Those reports were incorrect. The Charter Commission has not discussed anything. in Commission yet. Individually, different Charter Members have discussed with the press some things they are interested in individually but the Charter Commission has not taken up, entertained, discussed any of those to this point so I just want to make sure you understand that, okay? DAWN: Okay, so it hasn't been - RAY: So none of that's on the table. Those were all just possibilities. DAWN: This would of course, involve a special election and I'm wondering where the money would come from for that. I think it would be a very unpopular idea. RAY: The context we discussed a special election in was the sort of "what if" scenarios. What if we were to come up with changes to the Charter that we thought might be substantive enough to warrant a special election. If that were to be the case, when would you have to, what would be the triggers to hold the special election, when would it have to be held, how would that affect the year 2000 election, so it was just purely in that context. Kind of the "what ifs" to try to answer some of those questions and we didn't get all those answers by any means. DAWN: It seems like it would be, if the idea was entertained, would be just to 3