Adventures of... Government Study

I know, I know, I had friends that warned me not to do this but last ballot I put my name in for the Study Commission of my town. I think I was just as surprised as they when I was elected for it!

What I am doing:

Looking at the form and function of the city government(Organization, not people ;) )

Why am I doing this:

Current powers of my city government are restricted to state constitution(general government powers), if it doesn't say it in the statutes the Council cannot do it. (No local power co-ops for example) I will, with the help of two others see if we need to expand on the current powers and develop a Charter to set limits on those powers(self-government powers) or see if an organizational change is needed. Currently we are Commission Executive form, we will be reviewing this to see if we need the addition of a City Manager to help the Mayor with his department heads.


Should be an interesting experience, we have our first organizational meeting tonight to set up ground rules and focus. As we continue I'll try and keep posting anything interesting we go through.

This is weirdly awesome to me... please do keep us/me posted! And congrats on the election!

ohh cool, how big of a city are you living in and where in Montana.

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Originally Posted by Maxwell

This is weirdly awesome to me... please do keep us/me posted! And congrats on the election!

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Will do, part of the process is having open communication with the people who elected me, as such I don't mind and encourage comments here, just keep in mind I have to focus on what the town thinks needs to be fixed vice what might look good to fix from an outside viewpoint.

The commissioners by themselves do not have power to change the government they are studying, but together they are able to place issues on the next ballot for the city to vote on as well as make recommendations to the government they are studying as well. One sad thing is our county did not elect to have a study done so we are only able to really focus on city issues and not combined city/county issues.

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Originally Posted by shiva

ohh cool, how big of a city are you living in and where in Montana.

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Current population is 9.9k, the city is home to a University and a large rail road complex. Mainly small business with a couple larger national business's mixed in. Havre, MT

First meeting out of the way last night. Spent some time reviewing the funds we had available along with a simple budget. After which we settled on ground rules on running future meetings. Both my fellow commissioners were comfortable, and familiar with Roberts Rules of Order but unfamiliar with any alternatives. Partly my own fault but I did not have enough time to look up specifics for Democratic Rules of Order, CONSENSUS PROCESS, DYNAMIC FACILITATION, I tried to make an argument for at least looking at Democratic Rules of Order based on the fact that it would put all members on equal footing vice Roberts Rules that can enable persons with intimate knowledge of them to bend the conversation to their favor. The vote was unanimous for Roberts rules for future meetings and the rest of the meeting currently held.

Sticking point came when we discussed limits on public speaking when not in a formal public input setting. First motion went for no time limits on public input on agenda items. I did vote against this but the motion was carried. After which I put a motion to limit public comment on agenda items to before the agenda was discussed by the commission as well as allowing public comment after all agenda items were decided on(basically comments on non agenda items). Motion was carried unanimously. So basically we allow people to come in and talk forever before we discuss agenda items and after we are done with the meeting. #-o

Pretty dry stuff but allowed us to set up our next meeting this next Monday to develop a timeline for actions to take regarding both town and city government input.

I'm not fully familiar with Democratic Rules of Order, but I can say from experience that Consensus Process & Dynamic Governance can make for some LOOOONG meetings. When it's up to me, I prefer Roberts for general meetings and Consensus/Dynamic for committee meetings.

Unlimited time for public comments... good luck with that!! :))

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Originally Posted by FourOh

Unlimited time for public comments... good luck with that!! :))

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Currently our City Council limits comments to 3 mins, recent years it has been lax with enforcement as long as the individual was on topic. A few years ago the then mayor got tired of going round and round with one individual so he carried an egg timer with him, when it ran out you were done...lol.

As far as the no limits I have reservations but I doubt they will be realized. It will take movement of heaven and earth for us to get consistent public participation due to the lack of public knowledge of the process we are undertaking. I am the unofficial community engagement volunteer so I will do my best to go around and get some info from local organizations first (Civic organizations, Chamber of Commerce, Student government classes), first to get a feel what the town wants, and secondly to get them talking about it.

The main issue being the majority opinion of the city is we are going to remove people from government or do replacements. It will take a major commitment of time and energy to get the correct information out and to get people to come to us with suggestions either in person or via some sort of medium.

I'm on my third term on the city council this time around. I was on the council about 25 years ago for about 3 terms. This is a smaller town (about 1000) but we do have a few things going our way. We have a highly active medical center in town with 5 Dr's. It will be interesting to see what happens.

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Originally Posted by shiva

I'm on my third term on the city council this time around. I was on the council about 25 years ago for about 3 terms. This is a smaller town (about 1000) but we do have a few things going our way. We have a highly active medical center in town with 5 Dr's. It will be interesting to see what happens.

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Unfortunately the issue with smaller towns and cities is the fact you might have term limits on a government position but no one else wants to run, either because of politics or geography.

Interesting note, Montana puts this question of Government review to both city and county voters every ten years. I believe we are the only state to have it in our constitution from the beginning of state hood. The previous commission put a few recommendation to the council but it took over seven years for the voters to approve just a few of them.

One of the recommendations was to make the City Council non-partisan. We only approved that ballot issue last year. I cannot tell you how many people were more then willing to run for council or mayor positions but didn't just because the other side would not come to their business when they announced what party they supported.

Even with the now non-partisan elections you can still see the lines drawn but in the near future I hope those kinks get worked out.

Sorry I've not been updating, the commission has had two more meetings in regards to meeting with various public entities as well as the city departments. We are also setting up a listserv with the various commissions around the state as well as our own website to help the citizens get the info they need.

On related news I've been sitting in on various public meetings around town trying to get a gauge of what people are looking to do around town and what issues they believe the city government needs to address. The first was a group of individuals looking to improve park and trails around the town. I was interested due to the fact they were in the beginning stages of organization so was looking at what issues they would be dealing with as they set up compared to what our own.

The second meeting was over a group of citizens looking to allow the raising of chickens within the city limits. Currently the city does not allow them. It was interesting to see how they were comparing the various ordinances from the surrounding area as well as how they intending to present their case to the ordinance committee. The funny thing the ordinance committee chair is ex officio of the Local Government Review Commission. Small world that.

get ready I never had any idea chickens could be such a big issue. we just went through that. we have 2 areas of town that you can have any kind of a farm animal. cow, horse, pig, it doesn't matter. no restrictions of any kind, but the main area you can't have anything other than cats and dogs, if you follow the ordinance. it says no wild animals, that would mean goldfish or birds just crazy but the way it is. I thought we should change it but got voted down. :)

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Originally Posted by shiva

get ready I never had any idea chickens could be such a big issue. we just went through that. we have 2 areas of town that you can have any kind of a farm animal. cow, horse, pig, it doesn't matter. no restrictions of any kind, but the main area you can't have anything other than cats and dogs, if you follow the ordinance. it says no wild animals, that would mean goldfish or birds just crazy but the way it is. I thought we should change it but got voted down. :)

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It was noted during the (Pro Chicken) meeting that regardless of if they get through the ordinance committee and it passes reading(s) from the city council that the subdivision covenant agreements would not be over ridden. They would still need to go through the developer to get those changes.

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Originally Posted by Sarge104

It was noted during the (Pro Chicken) meeting that regardless of if they get through the ordinance committee and it passes reading(s) from the city council that the subdivision covenant agreements would not be over ridden. They would still need to go through the developer to get those changes.

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that would be a civil matter, we found that it would take a court case to figure out the covenant. we have found that attorneys totally disagree if covenants are legal or not. seems that there are requirements that must be followed for the covenants to remain in force.

My apologies for the extended absence, I received a closed beta key for World of Warships and have been whiling the hours away with that for the past month or so. Open beta is going to come around the end of the month and it seems to be a fairly well made online game.

As far as the government study goes we start our interviews with city department heads the beginning of next month. It's been a battle to just get ten questions ready to prepare the mindset of the people we are going to interview but at least traction has been made. I'm proud to say out of the 25 questions that I originally proposed, 8 have made it to the final list of ten.

Additional questions tailored over the next few meetings will help us delve deeper into the respective departments. Should be fun to find out how the city departments think they do things vs how the citizens believe. Slowly but surely it will get done. :D

Greetings team,

I apologize for my extended absence, bad things happened to my health, home, and family. I am happy to say that I am able to still above ground and day by day things get better. First though I will not derail this thread with personal issues and will finally give a final tally of what happened as my stint as a Local Government Study Commissioner:


FOR ADOPTION OF A SELF-GOVERNMENT CHARTER 39% 1,457
FOR THE EXISTING FORM OF GOVERNMENT 61% 2,325
total votes 3,782

After two years of study the Commission decided to:
A. Make the Mayor a voting member of the City Commission, yielding his control of the departments to the City Manager.
B. Instate a City Manager, overseen by the Council
C. Reduce the City Commission by one member, due to the mayor now being a voting member.
D. Open two of the City Commission slots to voting at large. Mayor to remain at large, and rest of Council slots to be filled by ward.

Resistance during our public meetings was mainly over cost of hiring a city manager. Explaining the Charter was not that difficult but getting the information out seemed to be. Despite using radio, paper, and facebook to reach out to the citizens there seemed to be the same questions popping up at the public meetings time and time again. I was most surprised by one young voter coming to the city council meeting and stating:

“I am a registered voter, so I can vote tomorrow, and I would like to know why this city needs a city manager as well as a mayor,”

I read that in the paper and had to shake my head as this was said a day before voting. All I can say is this comment seemed to be in the majority as the voters hit the polls, maybe next time we use the funds available to the commission to offer people money to come to the meetings that we posted and held over the previous two years...lol. In the end our ballot issue failed but many of our suggestions were put into place to help the people communicate more effectively with their local city government. While I'm sad the vote failed I'm happy I was able to effect visible changes in the way the city operates.

I'll go into the suggestions we offered in a new post.