By Jennifer Eisenbart
Editor
Challenged by a lack of candidates in the last three elections, the City of Burlington is considering changing the makeup of the Common Council.
After a lengthy discussion Tuesday night, the council agreed to and let city staff draft a charter ordinance that would change the aldermanic representation on the council.
Currently, the council is made up of two aldermen from each of four districts. The proposal – for now – is to change that to one alderman representing each district and four at-large aldermen.
The reasoning behind the change is twofold. One, the first district has struggled to find candidates to run for the open aldermanic seat each of the last three elections. The city has managed to find a candidate to run as a write-in each time, but no one has stepped forward without prompting.
Currently, Alderman John Ekes is stepping down in April. The city indicated it had a candidate ready to run as a write-in at this time, but Mayor Jeannie Hefty said she had to talk that person into stepping forward.
The name of the person was not available by press deadline.
The other reasoning behind moving to a partial at-large system is that the alderman often deal with phone calls and issues outside of their district.
Alderman Jon Schultz suggested a 50-50 split between district aldermen and at-large alderman, but Ekes said if the council were to change, it should just change.
“If we’re going to go at-large, I think we should go all-out,” said Ekes, suggesting eight at-large seats.
However, there was some question about whether then all the aldermen would come from one section of the city – and therefore leave other sections without at least one alderman looking out for their interests.
There were also discussions on whether the city needed an eight-person council. Some of the aldermen backed a six-alderman panel, while others wanted at least seven to make sure votes would not get deadlocked.
In the midst of the discussion, Alderman Bob Grandi said the city needed to look at what he considered the “root cause of the problem.”
“The real root cause is a lack of civic engagement,” he said, adding that the city needed to be more aggressive in engaging the public on civic duty.
The two high school representatives to the council – Ryan Werner and Gabriel King – spoke up on the topic. Werner said Student Council at the high school suffered from similar issues, and suggested the council get more involved with community service projects as a way to reach out at a younger age.
King added that he and Werner – both part of the council through the Partners 2 program – are examples of getting students involved.
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