Charter Review: Article 4

Artist: John Trumbull.

On April 17, 2025, the Richardson Charter Review Commission continued their review of the Richardson Charter, covering Article 4 (Nomination and Election of City Council Members). The Commission had planned to review Article 3 (City Council) as well, but decided to postpone that until the May 1 meeting to give them time to study the material prepared by staff (history of Richardson's City Council turnover, and surveys of other cities and the terms of city councils, compensation, and length of terms). I still expect major changes to Richardson's form of governance to come out of that meeting. Everything from longer terms to staggered terms to, who knows, ranked-choice-voting and other unlikely, but not necessarily crazy, changes. If anyone wants a say, submit your inputs or come speak in person.

Still no video by the City to link you to. To paraphrase City policy: "Move along. There's nothing to see here."

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Justin Neth again spoke during the public comment portion. He had much good to say, but I think I'll just include his opening. "Regarding Council terms, I really want to keep things the way they are. Electing all seven seats every two years gives citizens the most opportunity to decide who represents those on council."

The night before, at a forum, candidates were asked their opinions about changing the City Charter. Lisa Kupfer, candidate for Place 6, opposed longer terms for councilmembers, saying, "I feel like respectful challenge is the hallmark of healthy democracy...I think elections keep us healthy, keep us accountable, and also provide the opportunity for good discourse."

I hope the Charter Review Commission listens and agrees. If they do end up proposing a change, it needs to be for, as they said in rejecting other changes, "a compelling reason." In that same forum, Mayor Bob Dubey said he supported longer terms "because it really, every two years, it weighs heavy on our staff. The staff is the one that has to train each council member." Supporting the City Council is part of the staff's job. They get paid to do it. They've been doing it this way forever. Saying it suddenly "weighs too heavy on the staff" is as uncompelling a reason as I can imagine to excuse councilmembers from facing the public in an election.

Marcia Grau also came in person to speak. Good for her. She said, "I'm here to ask you to consider moving from a majority voting being required to plurality, because that would open the door to ranked choice voting. It would save us money on runoff elections." This would come up in the discussion of Section 4.08 (Election by majority). More on that when the Commission gets to it.

Nomination and Election of City Council Members

Residency for City Council

Section 4.02 says, "Council members in Places 1, 2, 3 and 4, shall reside in their correspondingly numbered districts and remain in that district for the period of time that they serve in that place." One commissioner moved "to add the requirement 'shall have resided in that place for a period of 12 months prior to the election.'" More interesting, to me, was the next question by this commissioner: "I have a follow up question, how do you enforce that?" There followed discussion about the legal definition of "reside." City Secretary Aimee Nemer explained, "There's no proof. It's what they put on their application. They are signing an oath, and we take that at face value." City Attorney Pete Smith explained, "Under state law, you have to accept the application on its face and while City Secretary is the local election official, she can't disqualify the candidate unless there is some conclusive document that establishes otherwise, and the court case indicates there are no such documents. So we at the local level have to accept it on its face."

Some members of the Commission weren't happy with that answer. They really wanted a way to change the Charter to prevent the candidacies of people who don't meet their preferred understanding of the word "reside." One commissioner asked, "For example, if there is a candidate that's running for this election that just rented a hotel room to run for an at-large position, you think that the people would vote for that person?" Someone else answered, to some laughter "We'll see." No one mentioned any names, but it seemed obvious who they had in mind. Alan North is residing in the Drury Hotel in Richardson and is running for mayor of Richardson. This week the commission asked Pete Smith to research ways they can change the Charter to make it harder for people who reside in, say hotels, to run for mayor.

This wasn't the first time the commission discussed ways to change the Charter to make Alan North's political activism harder. Thirteen years ago, Alan North was the name on the paperwork filed with the State forming a Special-Purpose Political Action Committee (SPAC) with the purpose of getting signatures on a petition for direct election of the mayor in Richardson. In a meeting in February on Articles 5 (Recall) and 14 (Initiative and Referendum), some commission members asked Pete Smith to research ways to require more transparency on petitions concerning who all was working to get signatures.

There's nothing illegal with this. It may not even be illegal if they were intentionally using their positions on the Charter Review Commission to harm the chances of particular candidates in the current election. It just looks bad. At least it might look bad to supporters of those candidates. To avoid any appearance of bias, maybe in future we shouldn't schedule Charter Reviews during election season. And maybe strive harder to avoid misbalance on the Commission we choose.

Minimum Age for City Council

One commissioner suggested that the minimum age to serve on City Council be lowered to 18. "If you're eligible to vote and choose candidates at 18, serve the country at 18, do a lot of other things, starting at 16, I don't know why you couldn't conceivably have an 18-year-old fit to serve the public office." No one argued with his logic. Instead, the arguments against his suggestion were that some 18 year-olds are not mature enough for the responsibility. One said, "I have a lot of grandchildren. They're all over 18. I wouldn't vote for anyone." Another tried the same argument from a scientific angle. "If you go over to UTD and talk to the brain science center, they will tell you the brain is not fully developed until at least 23." But what about the 18 year-olds with fully developed brains? What about even older people whose brains never fully developed? They didn't address those questions. But they were comfortable setting the age requirement at 18. Why not leave it up to the voters? They are competent to choose who they want to represent them. If a mature 18-year-old can win their vote, why shouldn't that 18-year-old be allowed to represent them? That's another question that wasn't examined.

Election Date

Currently elections are held in each odd-numbered year on the uniform election date in May. The commission realized this would have to change if they later decide to move to staggered three-year terms with some being up for election every year. They will come back to this section in that case.

At-large Elections

Richardson currently elects its mayor and all seven councilmembers in at-large elections, meaning all voters in Richardson vote for all councilmembers. I had earlier submitted my recommendation that Richardson adopt elections via single-member districts, meaning only voters in a particular district vote for a councilmember from that district. In my post, I wrote, "The majority of Texas cities use single-member districts to elect their city councils, larger cities exclusively so." I cited the makeup of the six largest cities of Texas as evidence. One commissioner, fact-checking my claim, said, "The particular individual referenced the six largest cities in in Texas, Houston, San Antonio, etc. All are pretty much single voter districts. Okay, so I went back and looked at that, and I looked at, actually, the cities that were more our size, rather than the six largest cities." He identified two that used at-large elections like Richardson and one that uses single-member districts. He concluded, "So if you're looking at the top six cities, then yes, they're single member districts. If you're looking at cities our population level, we're not out of the mainstream." So I went and looked at, not just three or four or five cities, I looked at the next ten cities smaller than Richardson. I found that four of them used solely at-large elections and six of them had some single-member districts. So, Richardson's use of all at-large elections may not be "out of the ordinary" but neither would single-member districts be out of the ordinary either. We have to use some other factor to decide.

This commissioner came at it from another angle by saying, "In all the top six cities, for instance, a particular council member will represent somewhere north of 84,000 people or so. If you're looking at cities at our level, you're looking at about 20,000 people or 30,000 people being represented by a single council member." I think he's looking at it wrong. With our hybrid system, where four council members have to live in different geographic districts, they still have to campaign in, and win election from, and represent all 120,000 Richardson residents. In fact, that's the usual argument for why Richardson's system is better. You can't have it both ways. But if it is better to have Richardson's councilmembers represent all 120,000 residents, it also places a significantly larger burden on Richardson councilmembers. Single-member districts, by reducing the size of the districts candidates have to campaign in, would give winning councilmembers a better chance of knowing their constituents and their needs. That argument applies to Richardson even if the other arguments aren't as strong, like Richardson has less segregation than big cities do.

Election by Majority

Richardson currently elects its councilmembers by majority vote. "The candidate for mayor and council member receiving a majority of all votes cast...shall be declared the duly elected mayor and council member." The commission discussed preferential voting, of which ranked-choice voting is maybe currently the most popular proposal. The Commission talked about this, but because a decision on changing this is affected by changes made to other sections of this Article, nothing was decided. There's also plurality-at-large voting, also known as block voting, which wasn't mentioned by name but seemed to be what one commissioner was describing.

The discussion didn't reassure me that there was an adequate understanding by all commissioners of the different types of voting, especially the pros and cons of each. The commissioners all need to be brought up to speed quickly if informed decisions can be made on May 1. City staff said they plan to return with more background information on this. If I had to guess, this is a bridge too far and the commission's decision will be to just keep things as they are: majority voting.

This could be moot anyway if Texas Senate Bill 310 passes. It would prohibit using any preferential voting systems in any election requiring a majority vote. Which is what Marcia Grau asked the Commission to consider moving to plurality voting. As worded, Senate Bill 310 then wouldn't apply.

The Van Taylor Runoff Scenario

One Commissioner asked Pete Smith to research how to avoid a repeat of a situation that occurred in 2022 in Collin County. Former U.S. Representative Van Taylor withdrew from the primary race after securing the largest number of votes in the election, but just shy of a majority. Some thought there should have been a runoff between the second and third place finishers, but instead the run-off was canceled and the second place finisher was declared the winner with only 26% of the total votes.

Research

Aimee Nemer briefly reviewed the research that was handed out—history of Richardson's City Council turnover, and surveys of other cities about their city councils' term lengths, staggering of terms if any, term limits, and compensation. This generated some discussion but no decisions. Commissioners have homework. Citizens do, too. So if you have strong ideas about some of these matters and want to be ignored like I've been since 2006, come to the next commission meeting and voice your opinions. See you May 1.

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And with that, the Commission adjourned.

Quotes have been lightly edited for clarity and brevity.

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"Rules under review
As candidates hit the trail—
Trust frays at the seams."
—h/t ChatGPT