The best reason for Bossier Citians to vote down all three charter amendments on Mar. 29 is not so much what they do but what they don’t do.
Two of the three introduce relaxed term limit proposals, that only would permit three consecutive terms for city councilors and the mayor but leave open the chance that an elected official could return to a previous office after at least one term out. Products of a Charter Review Commission whose final membership was comprised of appointees of city councilors hostile to term limits and their appointees, in isolation these offerings are unobjectionable, but they don’t exist in isolation.
Because on May 3, another, more stringent, term limits amendment hits the ballot. This one is three terms lifetime and retroactive, product of a citizen-led petition process and the superior version if the goal is to prevent citizen-politicians from being captured by government.
That seems overwhelmingly destined to pass. As after the disqualification of a District 3 councilor candidate left every race resolved or at the least resolved as a result of the Mar. 29 ballot, unless something unusual happens in the next month nothing but this one amendment will appear for Bossier City voters at the polls on May 3. Since thousands of citizens (actually twice) fought so hard to put the item up for a vote, they will show up to vote while few members, because no partisan contests will stir them up, of the general public which is comprised of just lukewarm supporters or opponents will do the same. This disproportionate turnout will favor heavily passage.
An argument the small number of opponents, almost exclusively political insiders who benefit from having the same people return to office frequently, will use to try to obviate this advantage is that a term limits proposal was just put into the charter if the two items on Mar. 29 pass. Thus, to remove this objection, those items must fail and thereby argues against their passage. Yet even if they succeed, the dynamics of the May 3 vote suggest the citizen measure will pass regardless.
So, by far the most important of the March items to defeat is the omnibus amendment that changes dozens of charter items. There are a number of reasons to vote against it, beginning with how it came about is replete with legal infirmities that likely would void it when challenged if approved by voters. For that reason alone, it’s a waste of time and money to send the city through that process.
Also, the small coterie of hardcore term limits opponents in and interacting with city government may hope – even as they publicly disclaimed this – that if first the changes pass then the strict limits pass five weeks later that they could argue successfully in court that what really happened was a “new” charter went into effect and that the citizens’ proposal was to amend the “old” one, so the latter would be moot. It’s a long shot strategy but it becomes completely unavailable if strict limits supporters prevent the changes by enough voting down the set.
Finally, the omnibus content experiences little beyond cosmetic restyling. A good chunk of it is rephrasing, and another significant portion changes things imperceptibly, such as with the City Council’s power to investigate. Almost none of the changes rises beyond this, and except for two have little substantive impact. The extremely minimal impact alterations include creating separate at-large Council seats that would elect only one councilor per position, getting rid of an ignored appeal board for building code appeals, giving the mayor a freer hand in appointing to the Personnel Board that reviews disputed personnel actions in the city civil service outside of public safety, creating an Animal Services division within the Police Department, and clarifying muddy language for amending the Charter.
Not putting these into effect will have next to no impact on how the city runs, and nobody will miss not having these go into effect. The only two that would alter that assessment is one that murkily guarantees regular pay raises for all employees outside of public safety (who already have a mechanism that provides for that) and another set strewn among several sections dealing with discrete city departments that allows for contracting of that particular function.
Both are mistakes. The salary hike language is so vague that it either forces the city to give raises regardless of budgetary conditions or it codifies in the Charter current city practice of deciding at some point it has enough dough to do that; one interpretation is counterproductive to good city management and the other is useless in a city governing document.
The contracting language is half-baked and more likely to drive up costs than reduce them. The piecemeal approach encourages that outcome, where the best strategy is to do what Central does, which is to contract out everything to one vendor except policing (done by the city) and fire protection (performed by a special district) and parish-level functions such as libraries and parks. Central solicits requests for qualifications and then hires a firm (it currently uses one of several who do this all over the country) to run most everything. The procedure of a request for qualification or proposal to encourage the best offer, rather than awarding sweetheart deals to political-connected firms, is entirely absent from the omnibus amendment.
All of these shortcomings absolutely disqualify a vote for the change amendment. Missing from it are far more consequential and/or helpful items, such as ethics reforms, procurement reforms, and mechanisms that would encourage better budgeting and fiscal policies. Just as the two term limits proposals should be rejected because something better is on the way, the omnibus proposed changes should be trashed in favor of reconstituting a new review commission in a couple of years that actually bears something to improve meaningfully Bossier City government.
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