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Wish washy Council and City Politics
Up for a vote until it wasn’t. Toledo City Council said let’s decide, then, whoopsie! Let’s not.
Here’s the short story. In mid-July Toledo City Council looked poised to vote to place a city charter amendment on the ballot. The amendment would extend term limits for Council members initially appointed to their seats.
Then State Rep Michele Grim, who served a minute and a half on Council, howled in consternation and Council ducked the vote.
Seemingly because of pressure from a short-term former member. But we digress.
Stepping stones
Here’s the backstory on the proposed amendment. Ambitious politicians commonly use a seat on Toledo
City Council as a stepping stone to other elected office. The list is lengthy. Council members regularly run for county or state office mid-term.
If they win and leave their Council seats, the remaining Council members appoint their replacements. The current charter counts the appointed partial term, regardless of the length, as an entire four-year term toward the existing term limits of three terms, or twelve total years.
The result is that appointees might only serve one year as an appointee, but that one year counts as an entire four year term. Such appointee can only serve two more terms for a total of nine years, rather than twelve, in office.
This is common. So many Council members serve partial terms as appointees replacing stepping-stone predecessors that it is common for members to serve less than twelve years.
As an aside, a democracy has built-in term limits not mandated by a charter. It’s called elections. Suck at your job and voters can end your tenure by voting for your opponent. But we digress.
To recap, current term limits set the term of Council members at twelve years. It is common for members to serve significantly less because of the current charter counting short appointed terms as full terms. A charter-man-dated citizens’ charter review committee recognized this and recommended a change, allowing appointees to serve three full terms unencumbered by the short term served as an appointee.
To be clear, the appointees must be elected to their positions repeatedly before this would affect them. Appointed to serve out the final year of a term, they must be elected later that year and again four years later before the current limits would kick in. That’s for at-large members. District reps could have an additional election in the mix. Yet they serve for less than twelve years, voters be damned.
Citizens serving on the mandated charter review committee decided this, plus a menu of other current charter provisions, was madness. They recommended wholesale changes. Wade asked Council to put the full list on the ballot a couple of years ago, and the panoply failed at the ballot box.
Now bits and pieces are being recommended for ballot placement one at a time. This one change would not count the appointees’ brief term as a full term and would allow election to three full terms. Placing the change on the ballot was teed up for Council approval.
Grim reaper
Out of the shadows jumped Michele Grim, current state rep and former member of Council, who went ballistic. She sent a letter to Council opposing placing the change on the ballot and posted a scathing video on social media. The video was widely covered on traditional media.
Grim said it was unconscionable, illogical, to treat term limits for some Council members differently than for others. Those initially appointed shouldn’t be treated differently than those initially elected.
Council flinched and swatted consideration of ballot placement away.
As an aside, term limits for appointees is already different than other members because they will always serve less than twelve years. But we digress.
Odd criticisms, those. Consider Grim’s Council term. And we use the word term loosely. Elected to an at-large seat in twenty twenty-one, Grim was sworn in early in twenty twenty-two. Within a few months she declared her candidacy for the statehouse. Elected as state rep that year, she left her Council seat to skedaddle to Columbus in January twenty twenty-three.
If you’re keeping score, Grim got elected once and served less than one year. Less than one-fourth of her term. Stepping stone.
Carrie Hartman got appointed to Grim’s seat. Then won election to the seat. Now one-year-and-gone Grim’s on her high horse kicking appointees like Hartman to the curb while being
all hoity toity because the illustrious Michele Grim got elected to her initial seat. Good for you, Grimmy!
Just think, Mickey. If folks elected to a full term actually served the term they were elected to, appointees would be few and far between. This entire issue would be moot. Instead folks like you get elected and use the seat to ambitiously scamper off to higher office.
Maybe we need a charter amendment to prevent that?
