By Terry Witt – Spotlight Senior Reporter
Williston City Council members this week began preparing to establish a Charter Review Committee that will make recommendations to the council on whether to change the document that governs how the city operates.
Council President Debra Jones asked all five city council members and the mayor to choose one person to sit on the 7-member charter committee. The full board will select the seventh member.
The committee itself can make recommendations to the council. The council will ultimately choose which potential amendments are selected to appear on a referendum ballot for voters.
City voters can approve the amendments they like, reject the ones they don’t like, or they can reject them all.
This won’t be the first charter review committee in city history. Jones recalled one previous charter review committee dating back 10 to 12 years and she thinks there may have been another one quite a bit further back in time.
She said only the voters can change the charter.
“That’s another thing the committee will have to remember – do you think the citizens will vote for that. Many times, they have not. I think one time we put 10 things on the ballot and I don’t think they passed any of them. We (the council) thought they were good. That’s why we allowed them to go forward. But the citizens either didn’t know enough about what they were voting on, which is part of our job – to educate them if we think it’s important and why it needs to be changed. Obviously, we wouldn’t put it in a referendum if we didn’t think it was important. It’s all up to the voters in the long run.”
One audience member asked if the committee could recommend something as drastic as adding council members to the five-member board and giving the mayor voting rights. The council currently consists of five voting members. The mayor oversees police and fire and handles ceremonial duties such as awarding student of the month honor but has no vote on the council.
Jones said the committee could make those types of recommendations or other recommendations as its members see fit.
Rumors have already begun circulating there is a move afoot to amend the charter to take away the mayor’s oversight of the police and fire departments, but nothing of the sort has been discussed publicly in any of the council meetings.
City Clerk Latricia Wright said members of the charter review committee will be required to take a course on Florida’s open meetings and public records law – the Sunshine Law. Committee members won’t be required to file a financial disclosure form. Committee meetings will be advertised in advance and the meetings will be open to the public. The public can participate in committee meetings.
Jones said the charter isn’t very long, about 15 pages, but she said whoever is chosen to sit on the charter review committee should review the entire document and educate themselves about what it says. Council members will bring back the name of the person they want to sit on the committee at the next council meeting. If residents of Williston want to be considered for the committee, they can contact a council member. Or the council member can contact the person of their choice.
“Make sure your person has the same frame of mind and knows where you’re going with what you think needs to be done and will represent you and the City of Williston well on the committee and they can come up with things of their own. They’ll give you (the council) a report; in section so and so, this needs to be done. When we did it before the first thing that they did was appoint a chairman and the chair conducted the meetings and also brought the report back,” Jones said.
She added, “In the past we had contractors, we had attorneys and some of them knew exactly what they wanted to do when they sat in the chair to discuss it and some of them didn’t have a clue because they hadn’t read the charter.”
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City of Willston Regular Meeting April 19, 2022; Posted April 23, 2022
