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City attorney to return with standardized rules after council debates appointment and mayor-selection procedures
Summary
After a study-session review of current rules and alternatives for council appointments and mayor/vice‑mayor selection, council asked staff to draft revised, clearer procedures: one set for mayor/vice‑mayor and a second set for vacancies and full‑council committee appointments, with tie‑breaking protocols and limited nominations.
The city attorney briefed the City Council in a study session Sept. 9 on how the council currently conducts appointments from the dais and on options to standardize and clarify the process when the full council selects members for boards, fills council vacancies by appointment and elects mayor and vice mayor.
City Attorney Theresa Leong described gaps in the existing rules, noting that while the charter requires the council to fill vacancies within 60 days (or call a special election), the council’s procedures do not prescribe a clear, single method for making multi‑candidate selections. “Your rules are pretty good about setting forth” the application and interview steps, she said, “but once you’ve interviewed the candidates there really is no rule” for how to proceed when the council cannot reach agreement.
Leong presented three alternative mechanisms for multi‑candidate selections: ranked‑choice tabulation (staff recommended creating a transparent IT‑assisted tallying tool if chosen), a process‑of‑elimination conducted by ballot and sequential motions by nomination. She warned that motion‑based selections can give an advantage to the presiding officer because of order effects; ranked choice requires more programming when multiple seats and differing eligibility rules exist; and all systems need tie‑breaking rules for the common dead‑end of a split vote (for example a 3–3 split when only six members are present).
Council members debated nuance and tradeoffs. Several members supported a two‑track approach: use a single, simplified one‑vote-per‑member process for mayor/vice‑mayor selection, and a separate process-of-elimination (ballot rounds) for the more complex cases of full‑council board appointments and filling council vacancies. Multiple members suggested adding explicit tie‑breaking rules (random selection such as names drawn from a hat or a coin flip) for “stubborn ties” after a reasonable run of ballots and any runoff attempts.
Council asked the city attorney to return with draft rule changes for council adoption. Leong said she would prepare proposed language and suggested the council decide whether to (a) standardize across all three appointment types or (b) adopt separate procedures for mayor/vice‑mayor and the other two appointment categories. She said she would return with a formal draft in October so the council could consider changes before the next mayor/vice‑mayor selection cycle.
No binding rule change was adopted at the meeting; the session served as direction to the attorney’s office to draft formal amendments and implementation language for council review.
