Gahanna charter review panel advances 10 amendments to city council, two items fail

The City of Gahanna Charter Review Commission voted June 8 to send 10 proposed charter amendments to city council for review and possible inclusion on the November ballot, concluding its work after multiple meetings this spring. The panel advanced measures on topics ranging from mayoral election procedure to planning and zoning appeals, and from council voting procedure to an updated nondiscrimination provision.

The commission’s package will be compiled with a cover memo and delivered to council before July 1, the City Attorney said, and council will consider each recommended ballot issue as a separate resolution before the Board of Elections reviews ballot language. “Certainly. So once the commission votes on which of these proposals will advance to council for consideration, we will compile that with a cover letter or memo prepared by the chair,” the City Attorney said when outlining the next steps.

Major items the commission advanced include: eliminating a primary when only one or two nonpartisan mayoral candidates file; harmonizing qualifications and conflict rules for mayor, council and the city attorney; switching ward-equalization from registered-voter to resident-population metrics using U.S. Census data; clarifying legislative procedure to replace an automatic removal trigger with notice-and-hearing due process; streamlining the charter’s department enumeration; multiple internal edits to the Department of Law; transferring appeals jurisdiction from the Board of Zoning and Building Appeals to the Planning Commission; an attendance-rule amendment for the Planning Commission; extending the charter-review cycle from five to 10 years; and modernizing the charter’s nondiscrimination clause.

Two proposals did not advance. A requirement to embed an annual strategic-planning mandate in the charter failed after commissioners raised concerns that the proposed language could unintentionally require a perpetually active strategic plan. A separate proposal to explicitly add the city attorney to the list of officials authorized to request special council meetings was debated at length and was not advanced; several commissioners said they could not find other Franklin County charters that grant that explicit authority and questioned whether it solved an identified problem.

Commissioners said they weighed the trade-offs between improving clarity and the practical risk of ‘ballot fatigue’ from too many items on the ballot. Several members urged the group to seek objective, data-based language for items that would affect representation, such as the ward-equalization proposal. The commission did not change any of the redline text for the measures at this meeting except where members voted to remove a small number of edits; the proposals will be packaged and presented to council in July.

Next steps: the report and recommended redlines will be transmitted to council and placed on the July committee agenda; if council approves each item as a resolution, the Board of Elections will review the ballot question language and, if approved, the measures will appear on the November ballot for voters to decide.