Committee moves to raise initiative petition threshold and ask attorney to draft language

A majority of the Everett Charter Review Committee voted to direct the city attorney to draft revised language for Article 11.2 that would raise the petition threshold for citizen initiatives and clarify procedural rules.

City Attorney Mr. Rammerman told the committee the charter’s current two-tier petition system produces inconsistent outcomes and a particularly low 5% path to the ballot. “The biggest one is dealing with threshold issues,” he said, and warned that the 5% figure can yield “less than a thousand signatures” for recent initiatives.

The committee coalesced around a 10% threshold. After discussion, members adopted an amendment specifying that the denominator would be “10% of the votes cast for the office of mayor at the last city general election.” The motion asked the city attorney to draft replacement language that would (a) remove the lower 5% path, (b) set the threshold at 10% using the mayoral vote as the reference, and (c) delegate authority to the city council to adopt procedures for processing initiatives.

Members debated whether to require a fiscal-impact statement for initiatives. Some members urged caution about politicizing or misusing fiscal estimates, while others said voters deserve accessible cost information; the committee left that specific decision to staff and counsel to address in draft language. “Voters should know if you really want to have a robust enforcement of this initiative, it’s going to cost,” one speaker said during the debate.

The committee adopted the direction by voice vote and asked the city attorney to return with draft charter language at a future meeting. The transcript records a voice vote; the meeting audio did not produce a roll-call tally in the record provided.