MUNROE FALLS: Although it’s quite a mess on paper, City Council is working just fine and residents are one phone call away from getting an elected official’s attention, Council President Sam Busic said.
Still, it’s understandable if some people are confused. Thanks to two charter amendments in four years, council went from an all at-large body, to a division of six wards and one at-large representative, to a hybrid of three wards and four at-large seats.
Because council terms are staggered and the first ward system was only halfway implemented when it was replaced by a new system that is now only halfway implemented, a knot was created that will take two more years to untangle.
In the meantime, some wards have two representatives, and others are being served by people they didn’t elect.
“On a practical level, if people know a council person, they’re going to pick up that person and call them, no matter who they represent, and that’s fine,” Busic said.
Councilman Ron Meyer, who serves the nonexistent Ward 5 or the temporary Ward 3B, depending on how you look at it, agreed the transition is “making everybody’s head hurt.”
“What we’re telling people is just don’t think about it,” Meyer said. “If you have a problem, call any of us.”
But if you’re curious about how it happened, take an aspirin and read on:
In 2007, the city’s Charter Review Commission proposed replacing council’s seven at-large seats with six wards and one at-large representative.
The movement gained steam because some folks liked the idea of having a council champion for their individual neighborhood. But others argued that, with barely 5,000 souls in the city, ward council members would be representing fewer than 1,000 residents, possibly most of whom weren’t even voters. That compares with, say, Akron, where a ward encompasses more than 21,000 people.
Council voted 4-3 to let the voters decide the matter, and voters gave thumbs up to the six-ward system.
Busic and Meyer say they were not fans of the change.
“People who have time or interest in serving aren’t distributed geographically equally,” Busic said. Especially in a small town, it’s possible to have several worthy candidates competing for a single ward seat while another neighborhood can’t find two candidates to give voters a choice, he said.
Both men said voters also lost accountability. Where they once had a say in all seven council seats, now they could vote for only two council members: their ward representative and the at-large position.
Most of the city came to agree, and the six-ward system was doomed before it was fully implemented.
After voters filled Wards 1, 3 and 5 in 2009, (Wards 2, 4 and 6 wouldn’t be on the ballot for another two years), a petition-driven initiative was put on the ballot to replace the six wards with a new system of three wards and four at-large seats.
Accountability would be returned, since residents would be able to vote for five of seven council members.
The issue passed easily in the fall of 2010.
So last year, instead of voting for Wards 2, 4 and 6 under the old system, voters elected a Ward 2 representative under the new system, along with a pair of at-large seats. The new Wards 1 and 3 are to be elected in 2013.
Of course, the new Ward 2 encompassed streets that another councilman had been elected to represent.
The Summit County Board of Elections told Munroe Falls to handle the transition by dividing their three new wards in two, so each of the three wards is temporarily divided into sections A and B.
In 2013, Busic (who was elected to represent all of the old Ward 3 and now represents half of the new Ward 3) and Meyer (who was elected to represent the old Ward 5 and now represents the other half of the new Ward 3) will either have to face each other for the then-fully integrated Ward 3 seat, or either or both could seek one of the new at-large posts.
“I’ve got two years to decide, so I haven’t really thought about it,” Meyer said.
And Meyer recommends residents don’t think about it, either.
“Even when we’re elected to wards, we’re all going to help resolve a problem regardless of what ward it’s in,” he said.
Paula Schleis can be reached at 330-996-3741 or pschleis@thebeaconjournal.com. Follow her on Twitter at http://twitter.com/paulaschleis.