Just a few weeks have past since our guests from Ludwigsburg, Germany paid us a visit. If you watched the City Council meeting from that week you may have heard that the size of the Ludwigsburg city council is much larger than our own for a city of comparable size. We have ten members here, and Ludwigsburg has forty!
This made me think about how a larger council could impact St. Charles. I would like to consider a thirty-member council in this story. Some drawbacks of a larger council are considered first.
Obviously a thirty-member council would increase our expenses. Each council member would have a small stipend along with an expense account bringing this cost to around $360,000 — $450,000. The current chambers would not be sufficient to seat all these members so we’d have to build a new place and that could cost anywhere from $1M — $10M — $?M. If we incorporate the council chambers into our community center’s design, we may be able to get away with a lesser amount for chambers at, maybe, $3million.
Council members attending conferences and professional events would rise from current costs to, let’s say, around $30,000. There are certainly other residuals that would drive up the cost per councilman, so let’s add another $100,000 to be on the safe side.
Next, everyone knows that with thirty members comes thirty opinions (at least) and thirty sets of interests and this could make debate much longer — if the length of the meeting were 200% longer, we would have to meet twice a week, starting at 5:00 PM to get through the agenda.
On the other side of the coin, a thirty-member council might be too many council members for any one person to try and unduly influence. Certainly, the dynamics of the Council would change from month to month because members would have more places to turn to seek support.
In addition to greater fluidity in alliances and sides there would be far more members of council to take on individualistic tasks, committees, studies, etc. Each member could limit the committees he or she serves on to three.
Another benefit to a thirty-member council would be the possibility of two forms of representation within one body. Here’s how I think this could work: Each ward of the City still elects its own council representative so that we retain a ward system (practical because residents can contact one member rather than all ten with concerns they have and because each member can keep better watch of the area around his or her home). The ward council members currently equals ten. Then, ten more members would be elected at-large during even years and ten members on odd years. The council members serving the wards would serve three-year terms while the at-large council members would serve two-year terms. For the sake of simplicity, let us use as our base year, 2010. In this year the three-year ward council members would be elected. In 2011 the first round of ten at-large members would be elected. In 2012, the second round of ten at-large members would be elected. The council is now complete with thirty members.
In 2013, the entire body of ward representatives and those at-large elected members from 2011 would share an election date. Then, the next time the ward representatives were up for election would be in 2014 along with the second group of at-large members or the “even-year” at-large council members.
Cyclical elections would help citizens to have constant input and provide continuity at City Hall at the same time. This ability for some wild cards to get elected would provide for greater scrutiny of operations at City Hall.
The larger body would help protect against developers from as easily buying up council members to obtain a majority vote. Currently, six council members are rather easily persuaded with a few dollars and a few invitations to some swanky occasions as was recently made clear by council members voting against the interests of their City in favor of a few “movers and shakers.”
Council elections would be held every year providing constant voter input! Now, if you think that the American electoral system can be convoluted, you should talk to someone from Germany and make sure to ask about first vote versus second vote! As a safeguard, a simple equation could be put into place that would prevent any one ward from having more than, let’s say, 5 at-large members elected during any one election year. Now, to be sure, any one ward could generate eleven council members, however, this still wouldn’t give them the necessary 16 votes needed to siphon off all tax dollars to one ward and the at-large members are elected to represent the City in its entirety! Voters would have to be watchful, but I think that more input rather than less by the voters would help create greater interest rather than diminish it.
Now we have taken a real step towards a participatory electorate fully engaged every year in the most basic level of government. Later, maybe we can talk about publicly financed elections, and our general elections becoming public holidays replacing Presidents’ Day. Hey, cleaner government is expensive, but consider the far greater cost of bad government!
On another note, a real question regarding the integrity of our elections has been brought before the Election Authority in St. Charles County. The problem is that all of the current options for vote tabulation depend on computers that can be hacked, manipulated, are difficult to audit and even impossible to recount with any degree of certainty.
We should all encourage our county council to research a system that can be checked against a paper trail. They can start by looking at a site called, BlackBoxVoting.org. Anyone in our land who considers him or herself a patriot should invest a little time researching the scandals that have already come to be due to touchscreen voting. With so much attention abroad, we need to remember that there are many serious battles here on the homefront that must be fought in order to keep our land free from being purchased wholesale by the highest bidders!
