Burlington’s city council has taken the first steps toward a proposed expansion that could increase its membership from five seats to seven.
The council took the proverbial plunge on Thursday when its members held their annual retreat at a city-owned clubhouse along the banks of Lake Mackintosh.
In the midst of its icebreakers and team-building exercises, the agenda for this all-day gathering included a “working lunch” that featured the council’s potential expansion as the main table topic.
This conversation was particularly welcome to Bob Ward, the city’s mayor pro tem, who recalled the failure of his previous attempts to bring this issue before the city’s elected leaders.
“About ten years ago I brought up the issue of whether we expand the council from five to seven members,” Ward recalled during the lunch-time discussion. “I asked for a public hearing to increase the size of the council, and if my wife hadn’t shown up with two of her friends, I wouldn’t have had anyone there.”
As a coda to this two-seat expansion, the council also considered some other potential adjustments to its composition. One option that had traction with some council members was the potential for ward or district representation, although it isn’t clear yet if this proposal will fly with a majority of its current five members.
The magic number
Thursday’s discussion about the council’s expansion marks something of a watershed for Burlington’s elected leadership – which, since time immemorial, has consisted of a mayor and four regular council members.
This five-person format is dwarfed by other metros like Greensboro, with its mayor and eight regular council members, or Charlotte, which has a total of 12 seats on the dais.
For a long time, the notion that Burlington should have a more numerous council has been a minority view among its own members.
This prospective change appeared to be in the offing in December when the city swore in Beth Kennett as the city’s new mayor and installed its former mayor Ian Baltutis and its retired police chief Jeff Smythe as rank-and-file members of the city council.
As these three newcomers took their place alongside Ward and fellow councilmember Dejuana Bigelow, the council had, for perhaps the first time, a solid majority in favor of expanding its membership. Kennett and Baltutis suggested in their answers to an Alamance News issues questionnaire prior to last November’s election that they would support an expansion to seven members, while Smythe said at the time that he was opposed.
Since then, however, there has been barely a peep of public discussion about potential addition of more seats to the council.
All that changed at Thursday’s retreat.
As noted above, the discussion about the council’s prospective expansion had been a long time in coming to the city’s mayor pro tem. The idea was also welcomed by Bigelow, who said she understood the need for expansion, and Kennett, who concurred with Ward’s view that any increase in membership should be capped at two seats.
Smythe, meanwhile, lent his palpably less enthusiastic support to the possibility of a seven-member council.
“I don’t love it, but I could go with seven,” the former police chief told the rest of the council. “The downside to that is that you have seven people for [city manager] Bob [Patterson] and [assistant city manager] Rachel [Kelly] to manage rather than five.”
It was then left to Baltutis to round out the picture with his own endorsement of the proposed expansion.
“I think we have a consensus around seven members,” he said. “Having more people in the community doing this work, and receiving phone calls from residents is helpful.”
What kind of expanded representation?
In addition to settling on the number of additional seats, the council discussed the need to resolve a few other details as its members proceed with the proposed expansion. These items include the length of each new council member’s term, whether they’re elected at large or by district, and whether these elections are staggered or occur at the same time.
Another issue that arose was the potential of replacing the council’s nonpartisan elections with partisan votes and/or having the mayor selected by the council from among its own members rather by the city’s voters.
The prospects of partisan elections and the mayor’s section by the rest of the council fell flat with the council’s current members. There was also no appetite for terms that depart from the existing standard of two years for mayor and four for each of the council’s other members.
The council was more amenable to staggering the terms of any additional members, conforming to the current schedule where two of the council’s four regular seats appear on the ballot in every odd-numbered year.
The council was much more divided, however, over the question of district representation.
Ward, who had actually brought this possibility to the fore early in his tenure, acknowledged that he isn’t too keen to put the idea into practice.
[Story continues below out-takes on council positions about district representation.]
ON DISTRICT VS. AT-LARGE REPRESENTATION
FOR DISTRICT:
BETH KENNETT: “I would love to see us have at large and district representation. I think we’d have more diversity on the council if we had district representation. . . It’s important that we have people thinking about their own neighborhoods. I’m very passionate about district . . . If we believe in the whole city, then the whole city needs to be sitting here.”
IAN BALTUTIS: “Having districts is a way to ensure there’s a path for [minority representation]. Without some district representation, the majority will always win.”
OPPOSED:
BOB WARD: “I’m a proponent of at large and the reason for that is because I think there’s more accountability, and I have no doubt in my mind that this [group of] five will represent each citizen fully.”
JEFF SMYTHE: “If the goal is gender diversity, we have that; and if it’s racial diversity, we mostly have that. Right now, we have a cohesive group that decides most things five to zero, and if you add a couple of members, you have an increase in infighting.”
UNDECIDED OR MIXED VIEW:
DEJUANA BIGELOW: “Being the first black woman elected to the city council, I understand the barriers to being elected. But I also understand that it can be done. . . My ideas might also not represent every person of color in Burlington, and yet every time I vote, it’s like I speak for all people of color.
“I would still like to remain at large. I love all of Burlington, and I represent all of Burlington.”
“I’m a proponent of at large and the reason for that is because I think there’s more accountability,” he said, “and I have no doubt in my mind that this [group of] five will represent each citizen fully.”
Smythe said that he sees no real advantage to having some members of the council elected to represent particular parts of the city.
“If the goal is gender diversity, we have that; and if it’s racial diversity, we mostly have that,” he added. “Right now, we have a cohesive group that decides most things five to zero, and if you add a couple of members, you have an increase in infighting.”
Smythe said that that the intestine rivalry becomes even more vicious in a district or ward system, as he said is evident in the jurisdictions that employ this practice.
Kennett nevertheless threw her wholehearted support behind the idea.
“I would love to see us have at large and district representation,” she acknowledged. “I think we’d have more diversity on the council if we had district representation…It’s important that we have people thinking about their own neighborhoods. I’m very passionate about district…If we believe in the whole city, then the whole city needs to be sitting here.”
Baltutis, likewise, expressed his staunch support for district representation.
“Having districts is a way to ensure there’s a path for [minority representation],” he insisted. “Without some district representation, the majority will always win.”
The wild card in this discussion proved to be Bigelow, who admitted that her own background has given her a different perspective on the issue of minority representation.
“Being the first black woman elected to the city council, I understand the barriers to being elected,” she said. “But I also understand that it can be done…My ideas might also not represent every person of color in Burlington, and yet every time I vote, it’s like I speak for all people of color.
“I would still like to remain at large,” Bigelow added in reference to her own seat on the council. “I love all of Burlington, and I represent all of Burlington.”
According to Burlington’s city attorney David Huffman, there’s more than one way for the council to go about introducing district representation.
Among the various options allowed under general statute is to require that some council members reside in certain parts of the city while allowing every voter in the city to weigh in on their election. The council could alternately limit the selection of district representatives to voters who live inside the district.
In the end, the council didn’t reach any clear-cut consensus on district representation. Its members did move the needle forward, however, by directing Huffman to return with some information about how the council can go about adding more members.
