The Porterville Charter Review Committee agreed at its July 3 meeting to consolidate and anonymize proposed charter amendments submitted by city council members and to return the consolidated list to the council for prioritization.

Greg Shelton, chair of the Charter Review Committee, said the panel received dozens of suggested charter changes and that the committee’s role would be to “write word by word what are your good recommendations and give it right back to them,” preserving the council members’ original wording for transparency. “We're not gonna be accused of changing anything,” Shelton said.

Committee members discussed the volume of submissions — committee staff and members counted roughly 31 items — and proposed an anonymized process for assigning items to individual committee members for initial review. The group discussed grouping overlapping ideas so the council could prioritize by topic rather than individual submitter.

Committee member Clayton volunteered (and the committee approved) to collate the council submissions into the committee’s suggested ballot-language format and to distribute the consolidated list to the full committee for review. The committee then voted to bring Clayton’s compiled list back for committee review on the meeting scheduled for July 17.

City staff (identified in the meeting as Fernando) said submissions would be posted for public review once they were provided to staff for agenda preparation.

Votes at a glance
- Motion to appoint a committee member to correlate and anonymize council proposals: approved by the committee (recorded outcome: passed). The meeting record shows the motion was seconded and the final vote recorded as 6–0 in favor.
- Motion to place the collated submissions on the committee’s July 17 agenda for review: approved (vote recorded as passed).
- The committee discussed but did not change the underlying proposals; the panel’s action was procedural: anonymize, collate, and return to council for prioritization.

Committee members said the anonymized, collated list would allow the council to prioritize items as a body. Shelton said that once council priorities are returned to the committee, the panel will research and prepare proposed ballot language or technical cleanup language as instructed. Committee members also discussed outreach and plain-language packaging of proposed charter changes to improve voter understanding at future elections.

No substantive charter amendments were adopted at the July 3 meeting; the committee limited its actions to process, assignment and scheduling.