 All right, I'll sit there. I'll sit, okay. And let me see if I've got a quorum of the council here with us. It's 431, one, two, three, four, five. There are, there are five of us. Okay, so good afternoon, everybody. It's 430, it's Monday, March 27th. This is a special council meeting. In addition to the two regularly scheduled or I should say workshops that have been on the calendar for some time, we also scheduled a quick 30 minute council meeting to precede our workshops this evening so that we could receive a communication from our city manager. But since this is a regular council meeting, we will do all the normal things like the pledge and the roll call and all of that. So again, this is the Portland city council. We are meeting in a special city council meeting for the purpose of receiving a communication from our city manager. And I just want to welcome everybody and commence this meeting. We haven't done a fully remote meeting as a council meeting for a long time. So I don't remember how it's done, but what I do remember is that I stand up in my home and I offer the Pledge of Allegiance for anybody who would like to join me. So now is that time. I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America. You can turn on your mics. And to the republic. And to the republic which it stands, one nation under God. Visible. Visible. With liberty and justice for all. Okay, thank you. I'm recollecting lots of meetings at home doing that. Will the clerk please call the roll? Councillor Fornear is not here. Councillor Rodriguez. Here. Councillor Dionne. Here. Councillor Ali is not here. Councillor Zarro is not here. Councillor Trevorrow. Here. Councillor Palatier is not here. And Councillor Phillips. Here. And Mayor Slater. Here. Thank you for that. So at this time, per usual during a council meeting, we'll take public comment on items that are not on tonight's agenda. So if you would like to offer comment, please go ahead and raise your hand. We've got 16 attendees with us and we'll follow the normal rules of public comment. I see two hands up. Okay. So again, give us your name and address. I'll keep the clock here at three minutes. I know, I think Jessica has to drop off at some point. So Jessica, don't worry. I think I got this. I'm going to make sure that we can hear from George Rowe. George Rowe, Hanover Street. It would be nice if it could be noted who on the council is at the national League of Cities conference. I think the taxpayers do contribute something towards that that trip for, for whosoever number comes up every year to go. So it'd be nice to know if that's why certain council members are not here today that that's where they are or otherwise engaged. But I wanted to note the concern I have about the proposed family shelter annex. I don't even know how to describe it as it's not yet a reality out near the margins of the city near the eco main incinerator. Sorry to interrupt you George, but that's actually the item on tonight's agenda. So we're not taking public comment on that item. Well, the concern I have is about the status of the existing family shelter on the corner of Oxford and Chestnut. And so my concern is that there may be a lot of interests in the city, a particular business in real estate interest that would like to see that facility shut down and moved somewhere else far, far away where that will be is up to you guys perhaps. But I'm very concerned that that is the next step in just excising social services from the peninsula. So I think that is an important thing to keep in mind as all kinds of social service planning goes on in our city on this topic or any other topic. I also wanted to point out, I had the HHS committee chair had specifically invited members of the public to email the committee about the homeless services center and questions surrounding it's opening and operation. And my emails on those subjects were not included in the committee deliberation or packet. I assume that was because somebody didn't like them. And so I'm disappointed because I thought there were very important issues to discuss and addressed. I don't think those issues have been addressed. The other thing is Sarah Florent used to run the Oxford Street shelter. And I believe she left the city in February and I would assume that would be considered a big leadership change by somebody. The person who's been running your shelter since 2019 is suddenly leaving the city right before the new one opens. Maybe she stuck around long enough to make sure that she wasn't leaving anybody in the lurch. But if I was opening a big new shelter and closing down one that's been in existence for 30 years, I would like the person running that to still be around. And it would be notable if they disappeared. So I'm disappointed that that never got discussed at the HHS level or at the city council level. Thank you. Thank you for your comments. And next we'll go to Steve Woods. Go ahead, Steve, you've been cleared to offer your comment. We can't hear you, Steve. So if you're trying, I'm just letting you know we cannot hear you. Quick response to George's question about NLC. It's a national conference that we budget for and any councilor can take advantage of going down and several have. But in addition to that, we have many people out of town right now. So we figured tonight was a good night to do all remote which is luckily our prerogative and a familiar enough place to be. Prerogative, anything else, Steve? Yeah, can you hear me now? Yeah, we can hear you now. Go ahead. I apologize, technical difficulties. I just wanted to speak on the record. I've sent a couple of- Steve, just go ahead and give us your name and your address just for the record, please. Sure, my name is Steve Woods. I'm the CEO of a company called Proamerica Health Tidesmart. And my address is 383 Commercial Street, Portland, Maine. And my comment really is just to reinforce the three emails I've sent over the last three days. So I start with joining the council and joining the community and wanting to find solutions to asylum seekers, to the horrible issue of homelessness. But I am asking- Steve, I'm sorry to interrupt you. This is public comment on items that are not on tonight's agenda. So we just wanna make sure that you're speaking about something that is not gonna be discussed later in the agenda tonight. Okay. Not knowing how the expo cancellation, whether or not that'll be agenda item or whether or not that'll be included in the item having to do with utilizing that facility. If it's more appropriate, mayor, and I'm more than happy to hold my comments until that item. Thanks, Steve. Tonight's a communication. So there won't be public comment. There will be, we'll be receiving it from our city manager tonight. I know I have emails from you. I know staff is working on it and you've shared your concerns about the item on tonight's agenda. So I appreciate that. But until there's a council action, we don't actually take public comment on the item. We do that when the council is taking action. Okay. I understand and I will withdraw my comment until the appropriate time. Thank you. We appreciate you being here. Thank you. Okay. Any other public comment on items that are not on tonight's agenda? Okay. So I'm gonna close public comment. Thank you to our speakers tonight. And I'm gonna ask the council before we head into the communication, if I could have a motion to approve the meeting minutes from our previous meeting which was on March 20th. Move passage. Second. Councilor Zara with a second from I think Councilor Rodriguez. That was me. Okay, thank you. Any council questions or comments on the draft minutes? Seeing none, we can go ahead and vote to approve those. Councilor Borger. Yes. Councilor Rodriguez. Yes. Councilor Dion. Yes. Councilor Ali. Yes. Councilor Zaro. Yes. Councilor Trevorrow. Yes. Councilor Pellettier. Yes. Councilor Phillips. Yes. Mayor Snider. Yes. Thank you everybody. Those minutes pass. I'm looking at us. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven. We're eight out of nine right now. Those pass unanimous of those present and we will move on. So I'm going to hand it over to the city manager who has a communication to share with the council tonight. Thank you, mayor. I would say my internet is not very stable. So I'm just warning you never. And I'm sorry about that. The tonight's communication is just on the transitional or emergency housing proposal. I just want to present this to the council and the public to let you all know where we're at and how we'll be addressing that issue moving forward. Be looking for any to try to answer any questions you all may have and get any guidance that you may have for me. As you indicated, there's no specific action item for the council this evening with regard to this plan. But so as you know, the city has received almost 900 asylum seekers since January 1st of this year in response to that significant increase in demand for shelter by both individuals and families. We have put together this plan or a summary of various action items and activation of various properties throughout the city to address the need. One thing to note is that we have been using several locations throughout the city and that includes the family shelter that was mentioned as well as a emergency warming shelter space. Additionally, the Oxford Street Shelter soon to become the homeless services center space. Those spaces have been used as well as we've been lucky enough to be able to use a Portland public schools gym to help us meet the need. And additionally, as some of you may know, Maine immigrants rights had opened the Salvation Army space to also help meet this significant need. So the Portland public schools space will be concluding that use on or about March 10th. And that that location currently is at capacity. There's approximately 130 family members that are sheltered there on a nightly basis. Thereafter on April 10th, we plan to open the expo as a temporary overnight shelter for asylum seekers. Oops, was that me or someone else? I think it was someone else, but I'll keep going. So we will be opening that on the 10th. We will be seeking assistance from the community and from community partners as part of this operation. As many will remember, we did this a similar operation in 2019 in the summer. So we are familiar with the different pieces of that puzzle. Kristin Dao is on the meeting tonight who can answer any questions about the specifics of that. It will require pulling together an operations group from various staff and departments to be able to facilitate the operation at the expo. And as I mentioned, we'll be seeking that assistance also from the community and we'll be asking and providing more information on that very soon. This will be open to asylum seekers only, singles and families. And that will be mostly because of the services that we'll be seeking to provide at that space. So it'll be very targeted for that specific group of people. As we've talked about a lot, the needs and services that are necessary for that population is slightly different from others that we serve. So therefore that will be the focus at the expo. And we'll be able to use the expo until July. At this point, as you saw mentioned in my memo, and I think Kevin is here actually on the attendees side, Kevin Bunker from Developers Collaborative and the Center for Regional Prosperity is looking at a potential location with the help of some funding from main housing. That would include the development of that space and it's at a location on Blueberry Road, as we've mentioned. And so that would have several parts that would come with that, require some approvals through different processes through the city. And as I mentioned, the funding would be handled through the Center for Regional Prosperity. The last thing I'd note on that is that we would have, as I mentioned, the space available specifically, the expo space until July, but due to some of our various uses of that property, it would be pretty focused timeframe that we have it open. And so we would have to be moving people specifically from that location, hopefully right onto that Blueberry Road location in that timeframe due to those other needs that we have for the expo specifically. And then food, I would just note would be provided on site as well. Next, I mentioned the families shelter in the overflow space. Those are both currently at capacity and we would continue to have those available for use. And then the homeless services center that's intended to serve 208 circumstantially homeless individuals and is expected to become operational the week of March 27th, so this week. And it will be most likely at capacity right upon opening. There's still some final details that we're trying to work out and until that will happen this week. And then we plan any asylum seekers that we would have at that facility, we would be moving them to the expo so that they could get those same access to those same services that we would be providing at the expo for the asylum seeking population specifically. And then the last piece, I'll just circle back to that Blueberry Road property. We're very excited that that Center for Regional Prosperity and Kevin Bunker from Developers Collaborative have taken that on. The hope is that they would be able to get everything up and running as quickly as possible at that location and be able to serve this population of people. And so that would be the plan over the next at least three to four months, lots of moving parts. And as I mentioned, we'll be seeking out some assistance from other community partners and from the community at large. There'll be follow-up communication on that. And I just wanna give a big shout out to Kristen and her team and to all the city staff that Parkstruck and facilities department and fire department, police department. I can't name everyone, but everybody really is jumping in and taking this on and getting this going due to the significant need that we have and that we're faced with. Kristen, did I leave anything out? Anything you wanna add? No, I just really wanna emphasize the numbers. I think it's important for both the community and the council to realize that while this is definitely needed because we're in a school gym right now with 135-ish people, it's fluctuates between 130 and 140 a night. We received eight families over the weekend for 23 people. So just the families that we have in the day space that came over the weekend and the families in the gym, we're looking at about 194 individuals there. So if the capacity is around, we're still waiting for our final number. If the capacity at the expo is around 300 and we want to leave some room for people to come, we can, yes, 71% of our Oxford Street shelter right now is asylum seekers, which is about 110 people, 71% of 154. And so we won't be able to move all asylum seekers over, but we will be able to move some and then free up some capacity like Danielle said, but I just wanna be really clear that what the numbers look like that this is not gonna be something that is open and going to solve a lot of problems and have a lot of people of the capacity, but it's going to provide emergency shelter with wraparound services, like we've been saying is really needed, some coordinated services there while other longer-term solutions are being worked on. Thank you, Kristen. Yeah, and we continue to work on those longer-term solutions as you all know through the state government and legislature as well as the federal government with work authorization periods and other funding that we're seeking. So yes, lots of moving parts. This is just one piece of the puzzle. And I obviously happy to answer any questions that you have or just any comments you might have, I'd be happy to hear them at this time. Thank you. Okay, thank you very much to our interim city manager and also director of HHS, Kristen Dao for being here. Again, this is a communication to the council, so there's no council action, there's no public comment, but this is an opportunity for us along with the community to learn operationally and administratively from our staff. And I welcome any comments or questions from the council at this time, just go ahead and raise your hand and I'll call on you. I'm not seeing any questions from my colleagues on the council. I guess I'll dive in. One thing, I've had people since this communication was posted on Friday ask questions about the blueberry road property. And my understanding at this point in time is that it's just as you say in the memo, there's a collaboration with community partners and the focus is on a Portland location. But at this time, the city of Portland's involvement is as the location, but again, no council action on this issue at this time. So I just wanted to put that out there and let folks know that we're learning alongside. And so the city is, as Danielle said, the city has a commitment to operating the family shelter and the overflow space, as well as the currently the Oxford street shelter and soon to be the homeless services center. So we have budgeted and we staff for those facilities. The expansion into the school gymnasium has always been temporary, but it's been staff's way of addressing this. So I think I just wanna sort of point that out and acknowledge the questions that have been asked, but also thank community partners for stepping forward and working to help address the issues because 900 new people since January 1st and it's only March 27th is a lot of new arrivals. So my thanks go out and I appreciate the communication. Thank you, Maria. We'll continue to keep you all posted. And if anything arises in the future that requires your action, obviously we'll bring that back to you, but that's all I have at this time. Thank you. Okay. Okay. Not seeing any hands going up. I'll make an announcement before we move to adjournment. So we've got two workshops on the heels of the city council meeting. One starts at five o'clock. It is a long planned workshop number two on the issue of clean elections, a municipal clean elections program that we are required to implement as a result of voter action in response to the charter commission's recommendations. So we have an amendment to our charter that lays the path for a municipal clean elections program. We'll take up our second workshop on that item at five o'clock. And then on the heels of that workshop we will have a discussion about chapter nine, the provisions within chapter nine that specifically have to do with referendum and citizen initiative. So that'll be on the heels of the clean elections workshop. And that too has been on the calendar now for a couple of weeks. But we cannot start those workshops until five o'clock because that's what we noticed them as. So we're going to take an adjournment. Everybody can turn off their camera and step away for a couple of minutes if you want to go and get a glass of water or whatever and then we will take it all back up at five o'clock with a workshop. So motion to adjourn, please. So moved. Second. Ah, councilor Diane with a second from councilor Ali because that's what I heard and we'll go ahead and vote on that adjournment. Councilor Fornir. Yes. Councilor Rodriguez. Yes. Councilor Dion. Yes. Councilor Ali. Yes. Councilor Zahro. Yes. Councilor Chavarro. Yes. Councilor Pelletier. Yes. Councilor Phillips. Yes. Mayor Snyder. Yes. Okay, everybody, we're adjourned. I'll see you back here in about four minutes. Thank you. We're back. It's five o'clock. So I had seen Perkins in the attendees side just a second ago. They're not there now. So, oh, there they are. Okay, they're coming in panelists now. Oh, great. Thanks, Ashley. Okay. So welcome back from a very short break, everybody. Thanks again for being here. So we've got 13 attendees with us at this point in time. So we dropped a little bit from the council meeting to the council workshop. And again, just a reminder that we've got two workshops tonight, the first having to do with the clean elections program, the municipal clean election program that was approved by voters in November and for which we are responsible to develop. So Michael, I think I'm gonna hand it over to you to introduce our the attorneys helping this work from Perkins Thompson. And then we'll head into the content of the workshop with them helping to take the lead. Sure. Thank you, mayor. The, yeah, we've been working with Perkins Thompson on this. As you know, they were there for the presentation at the last workshop, Jim Ketspikas and Brandon Mazer. I think they're kind of small on my screen, but I think that's who's there. And I will leave it to them to do their presentation. Thank you. Well, thank you very much, Mayor Snyder, members of the council. At the last, well, the reason that we're talking about these two ordinances is to try to implement the two changes to clean elections and campaign finance that were voted on by Portland residents back last November. And so two weeks ago, when we talked about the broad outlines of each of these programs, tonight we're here to talk about sample ordinances, draft ordinances, trying to prove that implementation for the council to consider. So tonight we're focusing on the draft ordinance language and the clean elections ordinance is modeled after the state clean election law, but also is modeled after provisions in the city of Santa Fe's clean elections ordinance. So it's we're in this ordinance, we're really trying to coordinate three different things to try to make it efficient for the city court and its administration and for candidates in their use. One of them is the whole candidate process, obtaining your nomination petitions, getting them signed, turning them in, reviewed by the court to make sure you have sufficient number of signatures. That's a process that's a matter of state law and local charter. So we've got that process going on. There's also a process for candidate registration under the state campaign finance requirements, reporting requirements, that process goes on. So we have those deadlines. And now we're talking about a third set of deadlines and a process, it's not, it's voluntary, but it's a clean elections process. So we're trying to make everything correspond to be as easy for both candidates and the city to navigate and administer. And again, well, in this draft ordinance, we had to come up with some numbers. And those numbers are largely drawn from what was suggested by the main citizens for clean elections. So when you're looking at how many qualifying contributions are required, where the amounts of qualifying contributions, what's the amount for seed money, what's the, those amounts we took from that memorandum as suggestions pretty much in hold as place to start. So nothing is cast in stone, it's a draft, but we want to try to get something in front of you that would implement what we've discussed before. And so if we take a look at the draft, we have the draft starts at page five in this small ordinance. And if you take a look at page five and the council packet, pages five through seven are the beginning part, the definitions. And the definitions are pretty straightforward, but there are two that are a substantial importance here that we might want to focus on being a qualifying period and a seed money period. And so I'll turn to Brandon to talk about those two definitions. And thank you. Bear with me just for a second. I'm going to try to share my screen. We've got a little bit of a watching monitor. So a little technical difficulty we're trying to overcome here. Bear screen. Okay. We should have that up on the screen. Yep, we got it. Okay. Thank you. So the two definitions that we wanted to point your attention to is found in section nine dot or proposed section nine dot six two. And it's really the qualifying period and the seed money period. And we are proposing two different periods. One for this year, this first initial year and then one for future years. So the qualifying period for this year would begin June 30th similar to when the nominating papers are available to all candidates. And then would end the same time that nominating papers are due or 71 days prior to the election. For future qualifying periods, we, and we'll get into this in a little bit more detail later on. It would be when the candidate holds the registration papers to register as a candidate along with their declaration of intent. But in no event would that period begin before January 1st of the election year that is taking place. The seed money period similarly is beginning June 30th this year and ends 85 days before the election. And then for future elections, it would be again as early as January 1st and ending 85 days before the election. So we've tried to anticipate this year being a little bit of a tighter timeline future years, maybe having a little bit more runway. Again, the charter, if you remember requires that nomination papers can only be released 127 days ahead of the election. So that period we can't touch. So with these proposed, if you do start as early as January 1st, you could have a candidate that registers, files their intent and may qualify but won't have their money distributed or maybe sitting on that point for six or potentially eight months until the funds are distributed at the time certain. At January 1, it was really drawn from the state clean elections law because if you're a house or Senate candidate, you can start your seed money contribution period at January 1st, but they also have primaries that they may have to go through. So it is possible that you might decide to move that date up to March 1st or April 1st to have a little bit closer to the time that you get nomination papers. That's up to you, but that's where we got that date from. And that's again for future years for this year because of the effective date, the budget, the constraints that we have, it will be a little more compressed and it will all tee off of the nomination paper date. So the next section we wanted to bring to your attention is really how to participate. So this is found in section nine dash six three. In order to participate, a candidate is gonna have to meet the following requirements. So you have to meet the requirements to be listed on the ballot through those nomination papers. You file that declaration of intent, which we get into more specifics in the actual ordinance. You've collected the represent number of qualifying contributions. You file the represent documentation and reports and you've received certification by the city clerk's office. So the declaration of intent is gonna be a separate form that can be requested by the candidate and it's gonna include a number of things. We focus on two of the more important things that have come up in conversations. One, that an affirmation that the candidate understands that any contributions, seed money contributions or qualifying contributions, collected prior to that date that the declaration was pulled can't be counted towards the qualifying contributions and that if they did collect any, it would likely disqualify them from becoming a certified candidate. The second point that was raised during the first workshop was that the candidate needs to affirm that they have disposed of any campaign surplus funds in accordance with title 21A section 1017, which is following the state statute to participate in the state election fund you have to dispose of any prior. The section 1017A section, subsection eight allows the candidates to donate the money either restricted or unrestricted to the municipality. So we are just clearly stating that a candidate could donate their surplus amounts from prior campaigns into the fund. They can carry forward a small portion for their seed money which would be the $100 cap that we have put on a individual donating to the seed money contribution which gets us into the discussion of seed money. So again, we have taken some part of the direction from the memo that was provided by main citizens for clean election. The seed money contributions that we have proposed here are 5,000 for a mayoral candidate, 2,000 for an at-large city council, 1,000 for a district city council, 1,000 for an at-large school board and 500 for a district school board candidate. And then the qualifying contributions, again, looking at what was suggested from citizens for clean elections, this would be in $5 increments of for a mayor, you would need to collect 300 qualifying contributions at-large city councilor 150, district city councilor 60, school board at-large 60 and school board specified district 60. We have, you'll notice in our draft, we've provided that as the initial thought to follow the state and require that the money, the checks would be cut directly to the clean election fund. Santa Fe does allow the candidate to collect the funds and then one check is then cut from the candidate's bank account over. In discussions with the city clerk's office, we think that not following the state is probably the likely best option, but I think it's something that is worth discussing here this evening. It's easier for the clerk to just accept one check, but on the other hand, there's the concern that money might be misplaced, let's say, if the contributions are made directly to candidates. And then getting into the fund administration, which is section nine dash six five, based on what our understanding is the sources of funding for the fund will be budgetary. We've matched what has been generally discussed at $260,000 per year being budgeted for the fund. All qualified contributions, when they're submitted to the city will be going to the fund. Any distributed funds that were unstent, any funds that were unstent, if a certified candidate does not remain a certified candidate, voluntary donations may directly to the fund, including prior campaign surpluses, all fines levy and collected under the by the Colleen Elections Review Board, which we'll discuss in a moment, and any other appropriations that the city council deems necessary. We've also followed Santa Fe and we discussed this at the last workshop of camping the fund, at least from the budgetary amount at $800,000 so as we discussed, if the fund were to get that $800,000 amount, assuming that's what we deemed the right number, the council wouldn't have to put that $260,000 in every year. It could be 20 or 25 if that's what it needed to get up to that 800 or not have to fund it at all if it became funded well enough on its own. So what does that mean for funding? Yeah. This then gets us into how we are going to distribute the funds. The funds, and this is section nine for dash 66 for those following at home, we are proposing the funds being distributed simultaneously to all certified candidates no later than 60 days before the election. These numbers are again from the memo from the citizens of clean elections for the contested column. For uncontested, we frankly just took a stab in the dark and cut it in half. Santa Fe actually only allows 10% of what a contested race would be. So these numbers are definitely open for discussion and feedback, but I actually see a mayor's race would be 120, city council, 32 at large would be 32,000, city council for a district would be 12,000, school board at large would be 9,000, and school board for a district would be 4,500. That would then also be prorated. And I'm gonna switch my screen just briefly to show a sample proration. I just did this this afternoon, so it was not part of your package, but I will get this over to the clerk to circulate. So what I've done is made up a campaign year where we have three mayoral candidates that qualify one at large, two at large councils, one district council, one school board at large and one school board district. Now these are just three election candidates. It's assuming that they are contested. So if we assume for this year that you've got the 6,900 in qualifying contributions coming to the fine, plus the 260,000, that would leave the total funding at $266,900 wherein actuality the needed funding was 449,500. So that's about just shy of 60% being fully funded for all of these candidates. So you take that 60,000 and prorated just across the board and the 120 max distribution turns into a 71,252 dollars and 50 cents for each mayoral candidate. And you can see that final column down the line. Again, total hypothetical, but just to show you how that proration is intended to work in the event that the fund does not have enough money in it. We also anticipate before the funding is distributed that if a candidate gets their qualifying contributions, books to be certified and realizes, I'm not gonna get the 120 as mayoral, I'm only gonna get the 71 that they could withdraw. And so all of these sort of facts and circumstances and timing leads us to the single distribution, at least initially of all of the funds because you need to know who's running and when they're running and what seats they're running for. And if somebody drops out, then you would have to readjust that distribution and it would go up for everybody presumably. So I will switch back to the presentation. We talked about what happens if, well, this is going to be administered by the city clerk, but what happens if appeals must be valid? And we talked about how awkward it was to try to bring that to the city council when some of these folks are candidates for the city council or for the mayor's position. And so we've put together here a three member review board. Yes, another board to try to fight appointees for, but it's only three. And the idea is that they would be able to fairly administer appeals from the city court's decisions. It's the language is much like any other board that's appointed in the city. So I won't go through all that piece. Appeals from these decisions would go to the spirit of court under rule A and B, which is the expedited review rules and procedure for local government actions. And, you know, there is a possibility that if you wanted to put that board out of business someday, there could be an amendment charter amendment to the efforts commission when that's created to expand its jurisdiction to hear this, but in the meantime, you at least have a separate independent body that could appeal through city court's decisions. So those I think are the fundamental pieces of the clean election ordinance. So turn this over to second piece that accompanies this because you remember charter question three, the first part was clean elections and the second part was the campaign finance ordinance. So with the campaign finance ordinance and that starts, someone decided that number six comes before number five in your packet. So this actually started at page three in the council packet. And if you turn to page four, there are four provisions there. The first one is section nine dash 92. And that really is business entity contributions to candidates prohibited. What it means is that business entities, a sole proprietorship, corporation limited liability a partnership cannot make campaign contributions to provide expenditure, make expenditures on behalf of a candidate for municipal office. This follows on a state law is not exactly the same, but it's similar. And it follows on the state law that became effective on January one of this year. So that's something that's apparently well-established law that you can prohibit a corporation from making those sorts of contributions. We're going to drop down to nine dash 95 on page four. This is campaign contributions reporting. What this provides is that the city court is going to establish a searchable online and publicly accessible database of all information included in all registrations and campaign finance reports filed with the court. So this directs the city court to be putting that database together and that's going forward where it's in the charter and it's part of campaign finance where simply including the same charter language in the ordinance. What I'd like to talk just a little bit about is section nine dash 93. This provision basically says that a business entity that is substantially under foreign influence shall be prohibited for making any contribution or expenditures or against any referendum petition. Now I was enacted by or put forth by the Charter Commission that talked about ballot questions. Ballot questions are state matter and charters can't change state law. What it really was intended to do was deal with initiative and referendum at the local level. So that's the language we use. It did not define foreign and when you look at state law I mean arguably if you look at corporate law a foreign corporation is a corporation that's established outside of Maine, Delaware is a foreign corporation. We understand that the subject matter here was not to prevent Delaware corporations from investing in ballot question or initiatives in Portland, but instead foreign as in foreign nation. So we get it and so we adopted an ordinance definition that appears in Seattle's ordinance and this is something that the Maine Citizens for Clean Elections directed us toward. That's where the entity under substantially under foreign influence definition comes from Seattle's ordinance. An interesting wrinkle though, Seattle's ordinance does not prevent foreign corporations or those substantially under foreign influence from investing in contributing to referendum or ballot question or initiatives, but to candidates. So it doesn't go as far as what is in what the charter commissions provided and what voters adopted. And that's somewhat important because in the U.S. Supreme Court case, Bank of Boston versus Pilate, the U.S. Supreme Court found that the corporations have First Amendment rights, free speech rights to contribute to issue advocacy, to ballot initiative, referendum type of campaigns, not to candidates, but to issue advocacy. And so the interpreting of the state law and in overturned it. In a later case, a more recent case, Blumen versus federal elections commission, a three judge panel of the U.S. District Court of Columbia took up the question and Judge Kavanaugh, now Justice Kavanaugh, wrote the opinion of upholding of a federal law that prevented foreign nationals from contributing to candidates campaigns on the basis of the federal government's authority and compelling interest in excluding foreign citizens from activities intimately related to the process of democratic self-government. However, Justice Kavanaugh was careful to state that this opinion didn't reach the ability of foreign nationals or foreign entities to contribute to issue advocacy, ballot questions, initiatives, referendums, just candidates, that's all that was on their plate in that decision. And it was not deciding whether Congress could prohibit foreign nationals from engaging in issue advocacy. So it was a bill that the legislature adopted in early 2021, that went before the governor. It was LD 194 and it would have prohibited a foreign government-owned entity from making a contribution to influence a referendum. Governor Mills vetoed the bill and because of the impact of the main voters and because such limitations quote, are also highly suspect as a constitutional matter, those quote. So, and there's also a question of whether municipalities can do this on your own rule and there's such a comprehensive body of state election law when it comes to finance. But I'm not saying this provision is unconstitutional. What I'm saying is that its validity, its constitutionality is not a matter of subtle law. Be that as it may, the charter commission places before the voters and the voters enacted it and they improved it. And so now it's to the council to implement this ordinance. So I'm just warning you that there's a question about the validity of this provision we've tried to keep it as narrow as possible and what it provides a set of business entity that is substantially under foreign influence shall be prohibited for making any contribution or expenditures for or against any referendum petition. We took the definition of substantially under foreign influence again from Seattle's ordinance. Many citizens for clean elections suggested we look at San Jose. In San Jose, the council directed staff to put together an ordinance doing this. They have not acted on it yet to our knowledge at least it's not available on the web. Their memo adopted the same definition as Seattle's ordinance. What we have left open the percentages that you might consider as to what constitutes foreign ownership, whether it's by one investor or one single investor or two or more. So one way around those are the provisions of campaign finance and with that and we would love to open this up to questions and comments. Great, thank you very much. Both of you for such a thorough presentation and also really well-prepared materials for our packet on the follow up as a follow up to our previous workshop. So I do want to just as a reminder to people who are with us, we've got 19 attendees. Back in early January, we started to develop a response to all of the approved charter amendments and get a sense of what we needed to do when. And so what we've done here is we've had a workshop that contained public hearing on March 13th. Today was a second workshop scheduled without public comment to address this issue. Our original schedule is to have a first read of these two ordinances, clean elections and campaign finance ordinance on April 10th with council action on the 24th. At our workshop on the 13th, we did talk about the possibility of pushing council action to May 1st if there's a reason to do so. Sounds like there's no reason that we can't do that. But the original plan was to stick with April 10th and April 24th for first read and second read. And of course there would be a public hearing at the time of council action on the 24th. So hopefully that helps people to reground ourselves in the schedule. And I look to my colleagues on the council for questions or comments in response to what we've just learned. Councillor Travarro, you're first. Thank you Mayor, thank you for all this. I appreciate all the work that has gone into this. It's coming together. I have kind of three pieces of feedback and then one question. The first piece is in regard to the number of checks and the total disbursement. I think the number of checks might be a little low. I think it was in the mayoral, it was 300. And just as kind of a frame of reference point, the Senate district here is you have to collect 540 checks and you get a total disbursement of 60,000. And that district is two thirds of the city. So we'd be asking someone who has the entire city to collect less checks and get twice as much in a disbursement. So I think they could collect quite a few more checks. And then just in general, I think the total disbursements are maybe a little bit high. I think if you were to look at the kind of average of what was spent in contested races over the last several years, you would find that it wasn't quite that much. I would think in a mayoral race, probably 100,000 would be plenty. My second feedback point is the timing of the disbursement. I really still think that two months out from the election is too late. I just think that's gonna be really hard for candidates to work with. And so I'm wondering maybe if we could do like two disbursements during the qualifying period. So one during the qualifying period and then one at the end. So like the qualifying period opens up, you collect maybe 300 checks and then that gives you your initial disbursement, which is maybe like half of the total disbursement. And then you can collect more and then at the end of the qualifying period you get your second disbursement for the total amount. And then maybe we could get some funding to the candidates kind of as soon as they meet that first threshold. And I think that would just be, just because they're gonna be incurring expenditures and there's, I don't know, it's really challenging to... I mean, there are vendors that won't let you take on a debt with them and pay them later. And then, what if they end up not qualifying in the end and then they have outstanding debts? I really think they need to have the money in the bank when they're ready to make expenditures. So that's point two. And then the other thing was just the uncontested amounts. I know you mentioned that that was a point of wanting feedback and I think they are too high. I think in an uncontested race, you don't need very much to run an uncontested race. So I just think that's an area where we could potentially save a little money. Those are my three feedback points. The other question I had, I meant to ask this last time and I forgot, the state system, we do an online collection system. And I wondered if we were planning to do that here as well for the $5 checks. Well, that wasn't planned, but I think that's more a question of the clerk's capacity to accept those online payments. That'd be... You know, I think one of our initial meetings with the clerk to get this up and running this first year, it wasn't gonna be available, not to say in two, two years that I couldn't, but I'll turn it over to the city clerk to apply. Yeah, that's right. So for this first year right now, the RFP is out for the clean elections database. We're anticipating that being maybe around $25,000 a year that we have to spend on that. And there's no funding set aside for another collection option to take these $5 checks right now. So it will not be something that we'll be able to implement for this year, but nothing says that we can't add it in the future. And we'd have to go out for bids or whatever on that or figure out a way to do that. But unfortunately, with this type timeline, it's not something that we're gonna be able to be able to do this year. Okay, that was just a question. So thank you, I appreciate it. And for some additional context, it was shared with me in terms of the amounts that the postage in tax is approximately $1,400 for one district for one nailer. So when you're talking about how much a candidate might need, that's a number that was shared with me. So if you do the typical thought process of three mailers, it's about $4,200 for a district just on tax and postage before you pay for the printing and the design and sign. So as the council was discussing how much those right levels are, I just wanted to put that out there and add that to the next time earlier as well. And one thought on the disbursements, and I understand the idea of getting money out there so people can get their campaigns done. But if you were to pay happy amount of people while they're still in a qualifying period, they have not yet gotten the qualified contributions they need in order to qualify for clean elections. They probably haven't gotten all the signatures they need on their nomination payments, yes, the petitions. They haven't qualified as a candidate. And so there may be instances where somebody eventually just doesn't qualify and yet has received funding, and that could be an awkward situation for everybody involved. Just a thought. Thanks, follow up on that. What if they could turn, like if there was an initial disbursement period, so they collect X amount first, and then they can keep collecting for a second, but that they can't get the disbursement before they get their signatures. So they would have to turn in all their signatures at the same time as the initial round of checks. Well, I think that's something we were kicking around. The hard part is that you don't know until you know how many people are running as clean election candidates for which positions, how much money you would have to pay if everybody were to get the full amount. So you don't know whether you'd have to prorate, but if somebody got their nomination petitions in at the early end of the due period, say two weeks in advance, they could come in and say, okay, qualify as a candidate, can I get half now? And then adjustments could be made on the prorata maybe on the second half. This, if that would be an issue, that would be one way to do it. So it would be two days. It could be an early date to get your nomination papers and qualify for the first half and then a second day later. I may be speaking out of turn because we kicked that around with Clark this morning, but the idea was either have one, ideally you'd have one day to make it really easy to do the calculations. Everyone's in, who's in, how much you're obligated for, how much you count. But if you were to have two dates, one at the beginning of the nomination period when those signatures are due and one at the end, that might be doable and I'll defer to the clerk and to the election administrator on that. And just to add on to that, we're somewhat bound by the charter. So the nomination papers are released 127 days prior to the election per the charter. They aren't allowed to be turned in until 85 days. So we didn't think we could change those, we can't change those dates. So comes to your point, I think the earliest round could be at that 85 day after the seat period in which is where that date came from. If you're trying to tie it to actually qualifying as a candidate for the nominating number of signatures. Okay. Yeah, I just think it's something to think now seriously and creatively about if we can because I just, I think it has the potential to really affect whether or not people use this program this year. And I would hope that it would be successful. So just something to think about. Thank you. Thank you, Councillor Travaro, that's helpful. Next, we'll go to Councillor Rodriguez. Thank you, Mayor. I'm gonna, just since it was just mentioned, just wanna piggyback on Councillor Travaro's last point. I was gonna ask about the two distribution option. And I think that last piece that Anish has said that how incentivizing folks to use this system. I think that limitation of not having early money, I think it's a big, big challenge. So I agreed to just try to think a little bit more creatively there. And I do appreciate the comment of how awkward it could be if a non-qualifying candidate has early distributions on that first option. I think that it's, I would say it's beyond awkward. I think that there needs to be some sort of liability established with the candidates or some sort of understanding of that's a risk that they're taking and secure that piece. But again, just wanna agree that two distributions make sense. I don't, I wanted to clarify, were you asking for feedback on whether or not the contribution checks should be made to the city or your candidates or did you just explain how your thought process was around that and you landed on it going to the city? We left it open ended. We had a brief conversation this morning with the clerk and I would defer to her. She was still giving, I think, doing to give it some further thought on how she thought the best way would be in her office and discuss it with the council. So I think we would turn it over to the city clerk to give her thoughts right now. So with the multiple checks as individuals get them, the intent is that the check is made out to the clean elections funds at $5 increments. So there's the potential that our office, when they're turned in, go through several checks. The idea was tossed around about, instead of them going to the clean election fund, those $5 contributions get made out to the candidates, then the candidate collects the $5 and then cuts one check to the clean election fund. The only downside to that is that there's no checks and balances on who the check truly comes from where we can administratively ask for probably photocopies of the check as we go through them for the recording process. Either way, it's administrative work. We're just trying to figure out what the best and easiest way is. The state, as it was mentioned, that they're made out directly to the clean elections funds and then the state elections office or clean elections group goes through them. So we just didn't know if we could, the thought was maybe changing it. So it's one check and then the photocopies are submitted to our office. So it's something to think about. All right, thank you for that. Yeah, I would be, just as a starting point, be hesitant for the checks to be written to the candidates and just like you said, no checks and balances. Long term, the thought of having an online payment system, that would simplify that process from your office perspective. Is that accurate? Yes and no, we just need to figure out how they can submit payment and how it looks with online. We'd have to talk more with the state and see how it works with them submitting payment and also the back end of, again, checks and balances of who those payments come from. So it's just, the problem comes down to the funding. Whatever we do is gonna cost money and where we have to come up with, like I said, the clean elections database, which is not something that we've ever had funded before. That's out for RFP. And then creating this to get it up and running, it just was too much to try to do an online payment this time around. Appreciate that. I'm kind of jumping back, jumping into the fine. Actually, let me not do that. Let me finish with this piece first. I just wanna agree with Councillor Tavarro that the distribution amount per uncontested raises seem high. I've ran uncontested a couple of times. The second time I literally signed the waiver to not have to do finance reports because I, there was not interested in raising a penny in the second time, but I'll just leave it at that. It just seems too much. There was a conversation during our last workshop about looking, actually there were several comments made myself included about making a differentiating school board versus council raises. And it seemed to me like there were, there was just still a lot of parallels between the two, both in distributions and seed money. So I still see these two types of raises very differently. I've experienced them very differently. So I still would like to see a little bit more of a discrepancy between the two rather than this coherent amount across the board, both for signature collections, I assume, yeah, for, excuse me, for distributions and for seed money. What would you suggest? Pardon me? What would you suggest for numbers? Yeah, so I honestly, I don't have a suggestion right now. Even the numbers that were presented today, I'm trying to digest them. So I don't know that I have fair context to give you a suggestion because the numbers that you presented were, they weren't within the frame that I was already thinking. So perhaps I need to re, how do you say? Refocus my perspective and then give you better feedback once I have a chance to do that. I wanted to also ask about the capped funding or the capped, having a capped fund. I think that when I asked that question at the workshop of why Santa Fe had a capped fund, my understanding of the answer is that it is just easier to manage financially when you have a capped fund because it's easier to zero down when you have the number already limited. I don't understand from a practice perspective or from a functional perspective, the reason to have a capped amount other than just administrating it becomes easier. So to clarify that, the capped fund is supposed to set a limit so the council does not. So if you read the way the ordinance is written is that technically the council needs to put $260,000 a year into the fund every year. And that number just comes from what's being contemplated this year. If you wanna hit 800,000, we're trying to make it so you don't, the council does not have to put that line out in the budget. They would be able to take that $260,000 and put it somewhere else rather than the fund, let's say it was at 800,000. And we felt like that was enough that you didn't have to put that $260,000 back in to make it over a million dollars. So it's trying to give a little bit of flexibility into the budgeting purposes for that one section of the ordinance. All fines, all qualifying contributions, unstepped money would still go back in the funds so it could potentially go over 800,000. All it's trying to achieve is to give the council some flexibility on a year by year budget contribution. In case there's a year where there isn't much call for a clean elections funding, there might be, it would build up a bit and might approach the $800,000 limit. So this would simply say that council hits a, city gets a breather for the next year, perhaps. Yeah, I mean, I understand that my initial thought is that the council has that flexibility regardless because we manage literally the entire budget. So perhaps I'm missing a key point there. I'll drop it just because I don't know that I'm like necessarily ready to thank you. Councilor Rodriguez, if you wanted to, it would just mean us amending the section where it talks about 260, where all the fund is funded, it would mean us giving, this is saying you have to put $260,000 a year in. So if you wanted that flexibility, we should try to rework that language. So you wouldn't have to under the ordinance every year for a game. Brandon, say that again, I'm sorry. Can I take a moment to say how much I hate Zoom meetings now that we've gotten used to in person once, which is really difficult, especially with that back connection, sorry. This is at page 13 of the council packet. So the way that the sources of funding, so it's nine dash six five B, there and I'm hoping we're still with you. We just went into, are we still with you? Good. So each fiscal year, so that's part B one, each fiscal year, the sum of $260,000 shall be budgeted for and deposited in the fund. So there's a hard requirement under this proposed ordinance that the council put money into the bill elections fund. That number that we've proposed is just the number that has been discussed throughout for this year, which was the 260. If the council to your point has a flexibility on the budget, we would wanna make sure that we don't put a set sum or we give you more flexibility here. This is similar to Santa Fe's where they say, okay, we're funding a clean election funding, we're funding it $260,000 in our example per year until such times it sort of hits that 800,000 and then we don't have to keep funding it, it's sort of self funding or we get a breather for a year. So if you're thinking you may wanna only put $10,000 in for a year, then we should probably reconsider how that section B one is written. If that puts a requirement on the council to find a budget. Okay, perfect. Yeah, okay, that does clarify. I appreciate that taking me back around the block on that one. No problem. And as I said before, to me it does matter that the council have the flexibility that we retain that flexibility. So being locked into that commitment doesn't necessarily make sense, especially if we can reassess year to year what the true need or what the demand is for those candidates that choose to opt into it, so that makes sense. I don't think I had anything else. Let me just look real quick at my notes. Councilor Rodriguez, why don't you have the stage? I guess I would in the beginning of the presentation, one thing that I wanna do mention that we went a little different from the state is under nine dash six nine for recounts and challenges. The state, as you are probably aware and I'm aware, does not allow clean election funds to be used for recounts or challenges. And that's due in part because parties get involved at that point. The city is a nonpartisan race. So what I propose here to clarify both for clean election candidates and traditional candidates is that in essence, if there's a challenge or a recount and it doesn't necessarily need to be a tie, that it would reset so that the clean election standard would be able to go out and fundraise under the caps. And then a traditional candidate instead of being, would be able to have their campaign contributions reset. It's a little bit different from the state's version, but it seems to be the fairest way to make it happen and hopefully it doesn't happen too often. I figured I would bring that up while you and I were talking. Yeah, I appreciate that. You sure it doesn't have to be a tie? Because that would just... My, yeah, I appreciate that and bringing it up. I had flagged that last time and it didn't make it to my notes right now. Yeah, I'm sorry, I'm thoughtless. Can I, let me, I need to let it simmer. I will say that the, you know, the, let me slay it, let me let it simmer because I have a few thoughts on that, but I do want to go back on to the, you know, recount or late election needs for funds. So let me just sit on it for a little bit. Yeah, and we can come back to you, counselor. Pop your hand up when you're ready. I've got a couple more hands raised here. So we'll go there. Counselor Travarro, back to you. Thank you, Mayor. I just had a crazy thought. What if we, couldn't we do potentially, we put a charter change on the ballot to change the, what's it called? Like the minimum turn in for signatures date so that they could turn in signatures earlier and in turn, perhaps turn in checks earlier in order to get an earlier disbursement. Does that make sense? I don't think the council can put a charter amendment on a ballot. I think that has to come from a charter commission, but I'm looking to Michael. I believe so too. And Michael can correct me if I'm wrong, but that would have to go back to the charter commission to be established to make any sort of amendments to that. Well, I'll jump in for just a minute, only because I just finished working with the charter commission. So if it were a charter revision, where it's a substantial change in government, then we've been talking about having to elect a charter commission and go out, but where it's an, if it's an amendment to an existing provision and it doesn't really change the structure of city government, that's something that the council perhaps could initiate as an amendment and then send it out to the voters. And you'll find that there are some amendments that have gone out to the voters over the last 20 years. And that's something that perhaps so Michael and I might talk about offline and see if we can follow that or not with that if the council is like. Okay. Thank you. That's interesting. Councillor Tavaro, thanks for bringing that up. So we'll flag that and come back to it. Councillor Ali. Thank you, Mayor. This issue of revision and amendments was what brought us out here in the first place. Don't let's go there. You're absolutely right. Anyway, I have a question. I want to go back to, I may have missed something where we say that if someone collects, take out the papers and they are not able to kind of like and they opt into a scheme and then they are not able to get and because that happens with some people that have taken out ballots I have taken out papers to run for office and are not able to collect the signatures. Meanwhile, they've spent money to do palm cards or created something small to study or compare with. I had a Councillor Tavaro saying that or is it Councillor Rodriguez that a lot of people will not want to like printers and other vendors will not want to give you. Is there a way, not that I'm trying to say we should encourage people to just pick up papers even if they know that you're not going to collect signatures. Is there a way to, is there a way we can put some sort of support in there so that if for whatever reason someone take out the papers and they are not able to get all the required signatures if they have already, even if it is a small amount to start with, if they are not able to whatever a small donations they've collected we use some of it to defrate of course that they may have incurred and then the rest goes into the money that we're taking. Goes to the city. I don't know if that makes sense. Councillor Ali, the best way to respond to that would be that sort of what the seed money period is for. So the candidate who's trying to qualify and collect those signatures, those qualifying contributions and those qualifying signatures and eventually their nominating signatures depending on when they pull out papers they can collect seed money and $100 increments and that's supposed to help defray some of those initial calling cards the cost of running as a clean election candidate. And the limitations are the listed in the seed money contribution. So from mayoral candidate they could raise up to $5,000 during the seed money period. Councilor at large, 2,000, district councilor 1,000 at large school board is 1,000 under the current proposal and a different school board is 500. So the point of that seed money is it goes towards defraying those costs or if somebody doesn't qualify to help to pay for down those costs. If the restriction would see money as you're not supposed to take out more debt than what your seed money could pay for. But then again, getting to some of the other councilor's comments there's somewhat of a limitation there on by the time you have spent that before you get your distributed funds. So there are some restrictions on what you can and can't spend that seed money on. And if you look at part two, prior to certification, a participating candidate may obligate amount better than the seed money contributions collected but may only receive that portion of goods and services that has been paid for or will be paid with seed money contribution. So you could arguably order 10,000 calling cards but if you only have $2,000 of seed money to spend you should only receive $2,000 worth and that may become tricky with some of the vendors but that's how the state system works and that's what we've proposed during this ordinance. Thank you. Thank you, Councilor Ali. Back to you, Councilor Rodriguez. Thank you, Mayor. I'm ready to talk about recounts now. I just needed a minute. That was a really tough one. Brandon, you can't just throw 2021 around like that and we'll expect people to jump. So my thought on that, recounts are optional, right? Our case was really unique because it was a tie and it was just responsible, right? It was due diligence. I could frame it that way but most recounts are optional and you could have a raise that by all means has been decided but a candidate feels that a recount is within the reality in which they wanna live in and they believe that it could shift the results and then all of a sudden, now we find ourselves publicly funding somebody's, I'm gonna be really vulgar here, ego trip. So I'm kind of hesitant to say that I would want to change that but at the same time, it was unperceiving cost or need in my campaign and for yours as well. So that's just a thought on that. Like I don't know that I feel comfortable. I'm proposing that it wouldn't be free election funds being used for recounts. It would be basically both candidates would become traditional candidates for the purpose of a challenge or recount partly because at least for these initial years the fund may not have, after the by November 3rd, the funds they have to distribute and there may not be any more money in the fund to allow a candidate to apply for a recount or a challenge. So you don't know that until election day. So it would be basically any, as we know, any, you have to declare a winner for the non-winner to request a recount and then that recount, those candidates could go out and fundraise up to that $500 amount for what their needs would be. So both would reset to zero for their campaign financing. Here's another thought. You could say that this would be for recounts where the number of votes in question is half a percent or a percent, something limiting. So it doesn't encourage, as you mentioned, you know, the sort of ego trip or the misuse and that's just the thought. Yeah, and that might be a good way to go at it. And Brenda, I know that that is not being suggested that we pay for it. I was just so in with what the document with the agenda material said that is not used for that. Yeah, I think that setting a limit for what margin of both difference could trigger a use of funds for recount that might not, I mean, I don't, depending on what that margin is and what counselors feel like it would need to be a minute margin for me to feel comfortable with it just from a philosophical perspective, because it is still an option or a candidate would opt into it. And yeah, I guess that's the other, the only other thing I was gonna say, I think was answered with the question about whether or not we can, well, actually how is the way that we, sorry to add this into there, is the way that we decide tie breakers charter or an ordinance issue. It's actually, I believe state statute, you know. All right, so it's not something that we can, I just figured since we have it out there, we might as well tackle it. I just really wanna change that, you know, but I'm sure Brenda has to do it. Statute did not mention salad bowls, however. Yeah, well, where's the draws is what they call it. The drawbar? Maybe a fight for another day. All right. Thanks, counselor. I'm gonna jump in. I don't see any hands up at the moment. So I made some notes earlier today and I think I'll just go through them. One thing I wanted to just remind us all is that we, last time we were encouraged to think about a pilot and I mean an ordinance is an ordinance, but it can be revisited. And so there's definitely, I think we're in the mindset, which is let's do our best and evaluate after this November cycle. And if we need to go back and make any amendments, we can do that because it's an ordinance. So I think that as we're having these conversations, I'm thinking, well, we may not know everything we need to know until it all plays out. Okay, so just to, so these are some quick, Jim and Brandon, these are some quick ones. So it sounds to me like funding from previous campaigns, if somebody were to opt into being a clean election candidate, funding from a previous campaign would need to be donated or disposed of through the appropriate means, but it couldn't be used in a future campaign as a clean elections candidate. Just confirming, is that right? Correct. Okay. Thank you. I had the commission and who will oversee this was a big concern of mine when we last met. So thank you for putting together that proposal. And I'm wondering if you can just email that to maybe Ashley and she could circulate it so that we can take a closer look at that proposal. You'll find that actually pages 18, 19 and 20 of your packet that's in the draft. Oh, I apologize. I don't think I printed that out, which means I didn't read it. Okay, I will go back to it. It's in the draft ordinance in section nine dash 70. I do have it. I didn't read it. Yeah, at least we know you have it. So that's good. Okay, thank you. Sorry about that, everybody. I just am going to a couple of things my colleague said. I think that I agree with Councillor Travarro's idea that we need more qualifying contributions. I think we ought to look a little more closely at the requirements for state candidates and acknowledge that if we've got somebody looking to run for the whole city, we want to increase the number of contributions there. I also thought that the disbursements seemed high to me. Maybe just for the mayor's race, I thought it is a lot of money. And one of the criticisms in the year that I was running was, wow, you guys are spending a lot of money. And so we're basically saying we would spend the same amount of money in this upcoming election. So I want to be thoughtful on that one. Okay. Oh, I also agree with the uncontested races. We could decrease the amount of funding that's contemplated in this ordinance. When Councillor Rodriguez was talking about the cap in 963-4-D, I think what I like is, hold on, I got to get to it. Well, I won't find it because I clearly can't multitask. I'm realizing I don't like these Zoom meetings anymore either when it's all Zoom. I think what I liked about the language is that, it can correct me if I'm wrong, that the cap language within the ordinance directs the council to make an annual contribution that would get us to the 800, but that we wouldn't need to make an annual budgetary contribution that would exceed the 800. Is that right? Right. Okay. So it seems like we've got both. We've sort of got the annual guidance, but in the case that we're going to exceed the 800, it directs the council to decrease annual funding in the budget, which could free up resources for other things. So I wanted to just catch that and say that I'm comfortable with that, but I understand if others would want to make a change there. Oh, I guess that's it for now. So I guess, and I know that we need to be talking about specifics here. So I'd want to do a little bit of research just to be able to give more specifics regarding the number of qualifying contributions that I think we should raise it to. And as far as the disbursements being high for both the uncontested races and the mayoral race, I can think about giving some specifics there. And I guess if a majority of the council felt like that that was a pathway, we ought to go. And we can, you know, we can put something forward to be included in the first read or make a change between first and second read. So I'll look to my colleagues on the council to see if that's a pathway we want to pursue together. Okay, that's it for me, Councillor Ali. I thank you, Mayor. This is just a comment for all of us to consider. The reason why we are doing this in the first place is to reduce money and even to go into our district. I have run all the races I've ever run are all at large. And I honestly believe whether it is Mayor or at large city council, we can reduce that amount. To be honest, both the contested and the uncontested races. So I don't have any figure in my head, but I would just, if the reason why we are going into this is to reduce the amount of money that people are spending until I don't know how much was spent in the first mayoral race, right? I understand that the cost of producing Portland is a small city. Maybe by the time I get a little bit older I may not be able to converse, but Portland is a small city. If you want to be the mayor of Portland, you should be able to knock on doors and talk to people. Yes, it is good to send out palm cards, yeah. So reducing the money will make people go out and converse and talk to people that they want to represent. Just a feedback to the conversation, in addition to the conversation. Thank you, Councillor. Councillor Rodriguez. As far as actual numbers on the distributions, now that I've had a chance to sit with it and see that other people also had the same kind of sticker, kind of shock, you know, sticker shock, whatever the expression. Anyways, I feel really comfortable saying that the uncontested mayoral race, you know, 60K, it just seems like a, honestly, just an unnecessary amount. I actually would like to see that closer to like half of that amount, maybe 30K. And even that seems ridiculous, honestly, if you're uncontested. But 30K, given that we're starting at 60, it would be my first sort of kind of like bargaining chip. On the contested, 120 seems way too high. So I would like to see that definitely, you know, under six figures. So somewhere closer to, you know, 60 or 70 or 80,000. And even that also seems astronomical, but just trying to work our way back from 120, those are the numbers I want to put out there. As far as uncontested, you know, school board raises, I mean, 2250 is, you know, I don't know that that's a necessary amount, but it also is a drop in the bucket out of 800,000. So I don't know that that's gonna necessarily be a big, you know, have a big impact on, you know, the fund itself. The other ones, you know, the, I think 32 for at large city council, that's not unreasonable, although it does seem, it's three times the amount that I raise for my at large city council raise, more than three times the amount, actually, including my recount fees, I should note. So I, yeah, but I think considering what historically has been spent, that's probably not, you know, out of this world. So those are the three numbers, I give three numbers of suggestions that I would like to see considered by my colleagues. Councilor Rodriguez, let me make sure I captured that. So I think you said reduce the contested rate for mayor to somewhere between 70 and 80,000, reduce the uncontested race for mayor to 30,000. And then those were the only concrete numbers that I got. I think you said it was the uncontested school board at 2250 for a district seat was okay. Yeah, that was my third one. And I'm going to say it's okay, although site note, I don't see where you're going to spend $2,200, if you're uncontested, but I'm not sure the candidates can figure that out. I'm just really frugal. So I'm not going to spend money if I don't need to. Thank you. The input is great. Cause actually, after we hear from councilor Dion and councilor Ali, I'll ask our interim corporation council to talk a little bit how we, about how we get from here to a first read, because this is, in some ways it's unusual for us to go at this brand new ordinance language and go from workshop to first read, making sure that we're capturing people's feedback. So councilor Dion and then councilor Ali. Thank you, Madam Mayor. You wait long enough and the conversation tends to drift to your point of view and I'm there, so I can join now. I don't know the numbers. There are two tensions for me in clean election. One, if it's done right, more people can enter the arena, more candidates, more voices. But the other tension is, and I've been a clean election candidate and I've been traditional candidates in a variety of different pursuits. The only winners with all this money are the vendors. Right, the many you qualify, you're handing it all over to them. Lifespan of a mailer is about 25 seconds, right? Signs, I'm never sure if a sign convinces people or just makes me feel better as a candidate because I see a lot of them. So the other part of clean elections, I was hoping it was gonna pull down the cost of the election, right? Bring it closer to people. If it's accessible, it should be affordable. And when I say affordable to all our constituents who one way or another will contribute to the pool of money that will be distributed to these candidates. So 120,000 must mean someone could buy TV, even in a limited sense. I don't know, it's a lot of money to run from there. I think it could come down. I'd like to think it would be below 100,000 though I don't have a number. And the same goes for the, for the election. I mean, did it really take 32,000? Is that what it is for that large district counselor? I mean, that's a lot of signs because what else are you gonna buy if you're running for out large? That's why I smiled when Councillor Ali was saying, you know, really the work of campaigning is talking to people. And I think we could do a study and having a lot of money doesn't guarantee success. As a matter of fact, the more common refrain is they raised a ton of cash, but they had a lousy message and money can't buy votes. So I just, I'm gonna use Councillor Rodriguez's term of being frugal. I think it's not about being frugal necessarily. It's just about being reasonable. We wanna increase participation. We wanna fund it reasonably, but I think the numbers are a bit high. On the question of how many signatures you wanna gather, I'm open to a discussion. I mean, 300, 500, you know, and ironically what happens? You either have volunteers or you're paying people to go all collect signatures so you can get money so you can pay them. There's some circles inside these campaigns that are very interesting to observe. So I would hope that we could modify the numbers in a downward manner in terms of what the distributions would look like. I think it just makes sense. And I always remember that I'm charged with spending other people's money. And I think it's in their best interest that we keep this affordable for the people actually contributing their money to our efforts to expand public participation in the electoral process. So thank you, Madam Mayor, for the opportunity just to share some observations. Okay, I appreciate the input. We're gonna go to Councillor Ali and then take a moment to invite Michael Goldman to weigh in on the process so we can be thinking about making our way from first read to second read. But Councillor Ali, where'd you go? There you are, right over to you. Thank you, Mayor. I think as we are moving forward with this discussion, I know that Councillor Rodriguez did throw in a number. I will say that even that is way too high for the mayoral race. I will settle at 50 for the contested mayoral race and then maybe 30 for the uncontested mayoral race. And I don't know what number to come with the city at large, but let's look at the mayoral race and then use that as a scale to scale down some of the numbers for the rest of the seats. Thank you. Thank you, Councillor Ali. So maybe to Councillor Dion's point, you wait long enough and everything is teed up just perfectly. So Michael, we're gonna turn it over to you to talk a little bit about because I think we're starting to get into the conversation of where do we wanna land? And that's gonna be the work of the council as we make our way to action. So I'm gonna look to you to talk a little bit about our process from first read to second read and how we move from tonight to first read. Thank you, Mayor. Yeah, and I will maybe helpful here in this part of the discussion just to get thoughts also from Jim and Brandon. But I mean, I think the purpose of tonight's meeting is for the council to give Jim and Brandon guidance on what if any changes they might want to add to the draft ordinances. And as the schedule is currently set up, we've got the first read at the first meeting in April. April 10th, am I right about that? April 10th. And then the second read would, and that of course would be like all first reads would just be a statement of the proposed order and then it would move on until the next meeting. And so there wouldn't be council discussion. There wouldn't be public comment taken until the second read on April 2nd. Help me out there 24th. Thank you. Thank you. And so yeah, so I think after tonight the goal would be for Jim and Brandon to send us a revised version of the ordinance that would be included on the agenda as a first read on the 10th that would give the council and the public an opportunity to review it prior to the second read on the 24th to the extent that there are, that you know, that counselors are, you know, wanna see changes made to that draft. Those could be proposed in the form of an amendment to be addressed at the second meeting. And I'm happy to take suggestions for additional comments from the clerk and the city manager and Jim and Brandon or anyone else who wants to weigh in but those are my thoughts on it. So it kind of sounds like we do have drafts in front of us this evening and we have a month to prepare amendments that could be considered by the council on the 24th and those amendments could be shopped around in the meantime and by shop around I just mean discussions, one-on-one discussions and sharing information about what you might plan to bring forward and certainly could be published in time for the action on the 24th. So there's plenty of time for the whole council to see that draft language. So I think that's what you're saying, Michael. Anybody else before I go to council Rodriguez? Brandon, Jim, Danielle, Ashley wanna weigh in on this topic? Another alternative is if you have two more weeks that you could spare, you could go out one more meeting you could hold another workshop really to focus on these numbers and see if they're at a point where they are. I think we've got direction to change a few of them but these were developed on the basis by main citizens between elections on the basis of what historically has been spent. The idea is to bring the numbers down then probably looking at the high end of numbers historically spent isn't going to get you there but I don't know where you wanna go with them. So when we've got some direction maybe worth half an hour just to workshop on the numbers to see if it's in a better place but that's up to you. Yeah, so I mean, given that we don't make decisions in workshops, we can look for guidance, we can look for majority guidance but I guess I appreciate the suggestion. I also wonder whether or not we can't accomplish that this evening unless people decide they want more time in order to use a workshop to offer more concrete guidance and then move to a first street. So that's open for discussion. Councilor Rodriguez. Thank you, Mayor. This meeting is really going as Councillor Dian said like you're way long enough and they'll queue up your next comment. I didn't want my suggestion of the numbers for distributions to come across as completely like this arbitrary number that I just kind of pulled out of nowhere. I do understand that the figures that are proposed are based on historical data. I do wanna like reaffirm what we've said that what we're trying to achieve here is to quote unquote take some money out of politics. So given that we do have this historical data perhaps so that we're not completely arbitrary in where we set the figure perhaps we can come to a percentage of what has been spent through traditional fundraising to then establish what we feel comfortable as. And what I was sort of kind of doing was going like a 50% of what was in front of me on the proposed language. And so again, not all to say that I wasn't being completely arbitrary when I said 60K to 70K and for the mayoral raises. So just to try to give us some rationale to work on. And then I had a question for the city clerk somewhat probably off topic now but for the database or for the database that we plan to have in place. And I appreciate that there's already an RFP. You mentioned that we're anticipating somewhere around 25K a year to pay for that software for whatever licenses. Just wondering is that 25K gonna come out of this fund or out of our operations fund? So we have to fund it, which is not funded. It has been put in my proposed budget for this coming year. The 260 was an estimate that was given during the charter for the clean elections fund the $260,000 was given as an estimate as you guys went through the charter commission process. And then I think we put in the what if I remember correctly it was like $290,000 that was put into the fiscal impact summary that Brendan had presented to council after all of these were passed in November. So it was an additional around $30,000 that we put in there thinking that the clean elections fund and database would be around $290,000. So it's not funded but it's estimated that was the estimate and that's kind of what we put in for this coming budget that still needs to be approved, if that makes sense. Yeah, I know it does make sense. And especially when you tie it into 260 plus you're adding like another 30 for this so brings to the 290 kind of the scope that we have. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Thank you. That's all I have. Thank you, councilor. Councilor Chavarro. I would suggest I hate to say it but maybe we should do another workshop. I feel like we have kind of come to the general sense that we'd like to see less overall disbursements and maybe more overall checks. But I feel like we don't have a good sense of exactly where we land on those numbers. And so maybe just another workshop to be able to get to that. And then if there's, you know I still would like to kind of work on the idea of maybe being able to do two rounds of disbursement so that we could get candidates some funding at an earlier point, but maybe that's something that I would work on as an amendment. Thanks councilor Chavarro for that input. I guess I need to look to my colleagues and maybe, you know, get some feedback on process. I personally, I'll take the other tack. I'm inclined not to have another workshop because we can't make any decisions in workshops but we can develop, counselors can develop starting points for consideration at a council meeting that we could put forward and make decisions about. That's my inclination. I worry we'll get into another workshop and we'll have another big discussion but we can't actually land the plane but we could land the plane with amendments. But again, that's just my starting point on that one councilor Dion. The best planes are built in the air. You have to fly. So I kind of hear what councilor Chavarro's talking about. Here's a way we could frame it up. We all have some ideas of what the cost, signature ratio, the seed money issue, a lot of ideas floating around here. I have a lot of confidence in my colleagues that they'll mull this over. They may talk to each other, maybe even talk to me once in a while. And we could come up with a game plan and then come to the workshop with some formed ideas that we might seek advice from Brandon and Jim and Michael. So that when we get to the floor of the council, we have confidence that our proposed amendment, whatever that might look like, at least carries legal weight, Ashley's weight in on it. Anybody else from staff that needs to give their final buff on the proposed language. I think that would be helpful. I don't see, in that light, I don't see a workshop as just receiving information. We live collected information prior to the workshop. We come to that workshop, almost like a committee meeting with something tangible and we're looking for confirmation or last-minute editorial comments from select staff. So that when we arrive on the council, the proponents feel that it's been vetted and we as supporting colleagues also understand it's been vetted sufficiently so it should move one way or the other quickly, efficiently. Thank you. Okay. Thanks, counselor Diane. We have a hand up from our interim city manager. I'm having some internet issues. Can you hear me? Yes. Yes. Okay. I'm outside because it was getting better signal up here. And I would just say that you guys can, I think, take some straw polls tonight if you wanted to get a better understanding of where everybody was and put forward what the majority proposal would be. And then from there, I think you could offer amendments that would at the after the first reading, second reading as you're all mentioning, then be the vehicle to be able to get the final proposal that you want to get in place. So I would just offer that tonight to maybe get a sense of where everybody's standing on sort of numbers and specifics. That might be a good way to do that sort of get a sense. So Jim and Brandon have a good idea of how to draft that first reading proposal that will be on the agenda. Okay. Thank you. So yeah, happy to do straw polls, thumbs up. We just need a starting point from a counselor to offer those places to react. So counselor Travaro. I can offer some numbers. I'm looking at the slide of the presentation called distribution of funds. And currently it has a mayor at 120, I would say 100. For a city council at large, I would say 30, city council district, I would say 10, school board at large, I would say seven, school board district, I would say three. And then for the uncontested amounts, I would offer a quarter of the full amount. And then I still want to work on this idea of trying to get an initial round of funding after some threshold of checks have been collected. And I want to raise the number of total checks collected. So. The qualifying contributions. Yes. Yeah. Do you have anything you want to put out there for council? I mean, just thinking about, like for the only one I can have in mind right now, I think is for the mayoral. And my thought would be to have in, like if we could do two disbursements, have the initial qualifying number of checks be 300, and then the total amount of checks be 500. So an additional 200 to get to 100,000 total in the end. So like the first would be maybe like, I don't know, five, 50. So 300 checks would get you 50,000, and then 200 more would get you your additional 50,000. And I would want to do that, of course, for all the races, but I don't have like numbers ready to, on the top of my head for that. Thank you, councilor. Ashley, you've got to hand up. The only thing, I just want us to talk about the disbursements and if, you know, the numbers, not knowing how many individuals are going to participate, especially for this first year, when we're only going to have a limited amount of funds, there's going to be a probably 100% chance that this is all going to be prorated. It's really tough to know how we're going to prorate it by the amount of candidates that we have. So if we give funds upfront, because somebody got them in really quickly, then others come and give us the checks and they then qualify, it makes it really difficult to disperse the rest of the funds. And what if we go over, then where do the funds come from? So maybe I would suggest that the first disbursement be like less than half of the total amount, and then the second disbursement be prorated. Just as an idea. Just because if we're following the $260,000 gets put in the fund for this year, if we add up, you know, one candidate in each of these categories fully funded, almost depletes the funds. Just to put numbers into perspective when we're looking at how many candidates are going to be running is all. Thank you for that feedback. So we do, there's an opportunity for folks to react to us. And by react, I mean, sort of thumbs up, let's look to move to amend the draft in front of us or look at an amendment that would reduce the contested race figures based on what Counselor Chavarro offered. So we could have that be in front of us in our first read. We could, I think we have options before us. We can, as the city manager said, we can kind of do a straw poll version of reaction tonight and make some changes that we would see on our first read. Otherwise we can continue to gather ideas and information and generate some amendments that we would look at. Counselor Phillips. I just wanted to, I'm okay with the numbers that Counselor Chavarro went over in the contested. I just wanted to clarify the amounts of the uncontested. You said a fourth of what's being. Yeah, my suggestion was a quarter of the overall. So in the case of if it were 100,000 total for mayor, then it would be 25,000, right? That's a quarter. So if we have somebody at the school board district, it's uncontested and it's 2250, how much do we know how much they would get? $500 and $562 and 50 cents. Is that enough? I mean, I don't know. I mean, that just seems such, I understand that it's uncontested. And I certainly understood what I'll counsel Diane said about what do you spend kind of the money on, do signs make the difference? I do, I think so. It really depends on how many signs you're putting up. But the other thing is, is that I don't, I mean, you pay for people to, I mean, there's other costs, I guess is what I would say. I just don't know if I'm in agreement with the uncontested of it being a quarter. Can I ask a quick clarifying question, Counselor Chavarro? I think you were saying it would be a quarter of what the contested race number would be. So. Oh, sorry. No, that's okay. I'm just clarifying that. So if it's 3000 for a district school board candidate contested, it would be 750 for an uncontested. Is that right, Counselor Chavarro? That's right. And I guess, you know, now that I think of it, I would, I mean, those are just for the sake of discussion. I actually, I don't even think an uncontested mayoral candidate necessarily needs 25,000. And an uncontested school board candidate might need, you know, a thousand, just, you know, I think uncontested candidates, you know, they might want to put up their signs, they might want to do one mailer or get one round of palm cards so that they can do some doors, but they're not going to have all the expenses, you know, they're just going to have like one big expense. Mm-hmm. Counselor Phillips, are you all set for the moment? Okay. We've got a couple more hands up, Counselor Aldi. Yeah. I just want to reiterate that I think 100,000, if the reason why we are doing this is to reduce, as Robert Counselor Rodriguez said a quote, end quote, remove money from politics and also extend participation, I will say I agree with Counselor Dion, which will make it affordable to the Portland residents who are going to pay for it. And because of all those two reasons, I think 100,000 for a mayoral race, even contested ones is too much. We got here, we got to, we are using an amount of money that was a result of the past two races. I don't know how much the first race, but I think a mayoral race is, and this is not to disrespect the mayoral race, a mayoral race is a glorified, at large council race. So I think 100,000 is too much. If anybody put their heart in a race, they're going to have supporters, they're going to have people that will converse for them and they should be able to converse. They should not rely on this program to do that for them. Pump card, yet science, I think I buy science more than a lot of candidates. My science are almost every corner. Hardly you drive in any part of Portland when I'm running that you don't see my sign. And 100,000 is too much. With the exception of the first race that I ran in 2016, all the other races, I haven't reached that much. I haven't even spent that much. So for a contested mayoral race, I will still say that we should go either 50 or 60,000. And therefore on contested, we give the person a quarter of that, or a half of that as a councilor of Arrosa. Thank you councilor Ali, councilor Fornier. Thank you so much. And I am keeping my camera off because my internet is just not doing great. I'm having a little trouble because I think we're getting a little far afield from what's in front of us because we're diving pretty deep into campaign strategy. And I think there are so many different factors that go into campaign strategy, depending on who you are as an individual, the community that you're showing up for and the race that you're running. And so I just wanna be really cautious about assumptions and whether you have an opponent or not, there is many costs to still being able to get out and meet your community, have volunteers to help you meet your community. If your hope is to win, and if you're uncontested, you will be serving that community. So it's an opportunity to really do community building. So I'm nervous to reduce the uncontested too far because I think the other point of clean elections is to again, create more equal access to more of our community to run and serve an elected office. And so part of what I do for work is to train candidates from lots of different communities, both large and small on how to run for office, how to look at money as a form of medicine to seed the things that we do for our community. And so I think I just wanna be really careful about how we're framing this and how we're looking at campaign funding. And so I'm happy to review the numbers. It feels like, I don't think we're, it doesn't feel like we're close to landing the plane on numbers. And so I'm feeling like we've been talking about this since five o'clock. And so if we're still not close to real numbers, I'm more comfortable with having another workshop with the ability for us to look at some specifics and compare them. I don't know that I would be ready to just decide on something this evening without looking at a couple of different examples of races and other communities that have these. And I know we have what's been presented to us by this group who has done a lot of work. And so adjusting those, I would be fine with that, but I would want a little bit more information before I feel comfortable moving forward with that. Thank you. Okay, thank you, Councillor Fornear. It looks like we could tack on a brief workshop on April 3rd, which is next week. I think that we are, what I'm trying to hear from people is that when we look at the figures, there's maybe agreement that we wanna look at some options, but we don't know exactly what those options are right now. So we could give some guidance. I'm just throwing this out here. For example, we could, I'm hearing overall that there may be an appetite for some reduction. If we lowered the contested races, let's say the mayor's 100 at-large, Councillor 30, 7,500 for district councilor, school board member at-large could be, I don't know, someone mentioned earlier, 7,000 and 3,000 for district. And then some percentage of that for the uncontested races, whether it's a quarter or a third half, we could put those options in front of the council for a view next week, but we could play with them, we could get some feedback over the next couple of days so that that meeting can be as productive as possible because yeah, I don't know that we're coming close to straw polling tonight in a way that feels really effective, but people are clearly thinking about the specifics of the dollars and how that affects people's ability to campaign. And so there's a philosophical question there. So if folks feel like attacking on a brief workshop to next Monday's workshop on affordable housing makes some sense, I'd look for a thumbs up or a head nod. I only see a couple of people on video, so this is hard for me, but the people that I do see look like they're saying, that's an okay direction. Councillor Ali, I saw that you had a hand up and I wanna call on you. No, it's just from the previous hand. Oh, okay. So knowing that we do have another body of work to get into this evening, I'm wondering if, I'm gonna look at Brandon and Jim, could you play with the feedback and come forward with a couple of different options that would be reaction opportunities for the council when it comes to these dollar figures? And I also wanted to ask if people could give a little bit of time thinking about the qualifying contributions and whether or not there could be something concrete that could be circulated ahead of time so that people could react. But I think that's on us a little bit because we've talked about it as an issue, but nothing specific. So if people are okay with looking at some options, just changing things a little bit from this distribution of funds to certified candidates portion of the ordinance, thinking about qualifying contributions, we could schedule April 3rd, probably doesn't need to be an hour and 45 minutes long, maybe just 45 minutes long. And then we get ourselves to a point where we feel a little more confidence walking into a first read on April 10th. Okay. I see head nodding, okay. We'll be blocking some numbers and a rationale and it's something you can react to when we understand other counselors and we'll have ideas as well. Great. Okay. So again, for people who can't turn on their video, I've gotten a couple of thumbs up and by text and I'm seeing people nodding and thumbs up on video. So I think we'll go in that direction. Hype up, I never wanna transition us too quickly. If anybody has anything they wanna say right now, go for it. Okay. This has been productive. I think this is part of the work. So I'm not at all surprised that we're diving deep and we all wanna do the best that we can. So we'll plan accordingly and bring the issue back up next Monday. Daniel. Okay. I'll come right back to you, counselor. Oh, I was gonna say, go ahead, counselor. I was gonna say, Daniel's hand is up. Because you say you don't see everyone's hand. Yeah, I was just gonna say, I think that's exactly right. I would say that, Jim, if you could do two or three different drafts based on what you've heard tonight so that people could actually give a straw poll understanding at the workshop next week, that would be really helpful. And I think that based on what I've heard, then we would be able to go into a draft for the first reading with a much clearer picture and not have to have too many competing amendments coming in at the second read. Obviously still have that ability to do that at a second read, but I think that that would be really helpful. We will help you, we'll do that. Okay. I think we've got a plan. Thank you. Thank you to Brandon Mazer and Jim Katzafikas from Perkins Thompson for being here and hanging with us through this conversation. And we will see you. I guess I'm assuming we can grab some of your time on April 3rd, does that work for you? It will. Thank you. Okay, thank you so much. I really appreciate it. Danielle, your hand is still up. Did you want to jump back in? Oh, no, okay. Okay, so I think that concludes workshop number one, the second discussion about clean elections and we'll transition right into workshop number two. Thank you everybody for thoughtful feedback and a great starting point based on the work that we did together on the 13th. So we will move into our next workshop which is a council discussion of possible changes to initiation and referendum provisions in chapter nine of the Portland city code. So I'm just gonna offer a little bit of context here. We've, again, we've got 19 attendees with us, so not a big group, but thanks for anybody who's interested in listening through this conversation. So for me, we've been as a community and a council talking about chapter nine for a while now. I would say, you know, with so many on the ballot and unprecedented number on the ballot in 2020 and then this past fall in 2022 with so many both citizen initiatives and questions before voters having to do with charter amendments. The issue has been talked about a lot and at our goal setting workshop in early December, I brought it out for the possible 2023 goal for the council. So it was raised, we didn't identify it as a shared council goal, but it was brought to the fore, followed up with my colleagues a couple of weeks after that to gauge interest. But honestly, I think with so many things on our plates and on our radar, we didn't pick it up at that time. In the last month or so, I've gotten outreach from counselors saying, let's do this. And so I've been working with my colleagues on the council as well as city staff to see what we could do. So what we've got before us tonight is kind of Michael Goldman's reaction to the three areas that I think are not surprising to people that have been talked about quite a bit. Are we looking for the right number of signatures? Does the five year amendment work? And do we need to understand the cost associated with ordinance amendments that happen at the polls? I know we've gotten some other council feedback in the meantime about ideas. And so tonight really is an opportunity for us to discuss chapter nine, possible changes to the referendum and initiation provisions in chapter nine. We do have some work by corporation council in the packet, but what I'd like to do is first hand it over to Michael Goldman just to talk a little bit about what you've done, Michael, to help support this work and then open it up to the council to talk about whether or not, where we wanna be with this work. We have a schedule before us that could support action by the council on April 24th. That would allow for a question to go to the voters in June. If that is too speedy a process, we have another election in November. So we're talking about council action a month from now. And so I'm looking for everybody's reaction to that. And I know the community is interested in this body of work. So anyway, I'm gonna hand it over to Michael and I'll see what everybody wants to say about this before us tonight. Thank you, mayor. Members of the city council, I think as you all know, there's included in the backup just a brief memo from me sort of summarizing, a few of the general areas that members of this council and members of the public have suggested could be revised. And so just to give you a little, just a little bit of legal background, this, and I think we're generally aware of it, but this portion of the ordinance cannot be revised through the citizen initiative process. It cannot be revised just by a vote of the council because it was initially approved under the state constitution approved by the voters. And so the only way we can change the initiation and referendum provision, this is by the way, just to clarify article three of chapter nine in the city code, the only way it can be changed is to go back to the voters. And so what we're proposing for process as the mayor just explained is workshop tonight to try to get a sense of to get guidance similar to what we were talking about before with the clean elections ordinance, but get guidance tonight on changes that the council would like to see, come back for a first read on April 10th and then a second read on April 24th. But again, as the mayor suggested, if more time is needed, then that's up to the council to decide. The memo, and I think everybody's got it. It's included in the backup. I don't know if it's helpful for me to share that. I can try to do that mayor if you'd like or we can just go through it. What's easier for you? What's the question, Michael? Oh, do you want me to share my screen with that memo? Or it's included in the backup. Everybody's got it. I don't know if it's- Yeah, I don't think you need to. Okay, so just a quick summary. I'm not gonna read my memo to you, but the petition signature requirement, there's been suggestions that the number might be too low and should we take steps to increase that. The reviewing the ordinance, the proposed ordinance summary and title prior to obtaining signatures has also been suggested that would be something that would be done by my office and the clerk's office presumably at the time that an application for a petition is filed by a petitioner committee. And we could talk about adding language to create a procedure for that. There's been a suggestion that a citizen initiative should be accompanied by a fiscal impact statement which would be included on the petition and also included on the ballot if it makes it that far in the process describing the impact of the referendum on city's budget. Another issue sort of related to budget is publication costs associated with the referendum process. And I think that Ashley might be able to weigh in a bit on the costs associated with that, but the costs are quite substantial and publishing at two separate times the entire text of a citizen initiative in the paper, which can end up being quite costly, particularly during a time like last fall when there were a substantial number of initiatives on the ballot. And then the other area for discussion is the five-year rule which in section 946 which currently prohibits the council from amending an ordinance approved through the citizen initiative process for a period of five years after the effective date of the ordinance. And so I think it would be helpful to have some discussion about whether that five-year period should be changed, shortened, eliminated, left in place. And so it'd be interested in hearing the council's feedback on that. And I think that about sums it up. And I'm looking, I think maybe it makes sense to sort of go through each section and get a sense from you all on what you would like to see because as it is right now, well, this is the first discussion that the council's had on these subjects as a body. So I think it probably makes sense to start at the top of that memo and discuss the number of voters that currently, as I mentioned earlier, there's 1500 registered voters in the city that have to sign. And so there's been some suggestion about whether or not that should be increased. The state, the number of required under state law is 10% of the number of votes cast in the last gubernatorial election. And so there's been a suggestion that that might be a place to start. So with that, I'll turn it back over to you, Mayor. Okay, thanks for that context. I'm gonna look to my colleagues on the council. It looks like Michael has teed us up to be able to talk about some of the proposed edits that we can react to. And of course, welcome additional thoughts as well. Councilor Dionne. Thank you, Mayor. And thank you, Michael, for the draft. It was very helpful. So I'll try to follow your lead and just give a reaction as we go through the memo. I just wanna make this advanced observation. There are two themes that have consistently been placed before me by constituents and others in discussing the referendum process. And that has to do with what they perceived to be an insufficient number of signatories necessary to put something on the ballot. It is one piece in the idea as to whether or not we can correct what appears to be an error in the language and its consequences if it's adopted through elections. So I'll reserve my comment right now to just the number of signatures. I would favor increasing that to the standard that's accomplished at the stake with a 10% ratio of voters that participated in the gubernatorial election proceeding this particular ballot initiative. I think it alerts us of the fact that there's a notable demographic in the city that wants to accomplish the benefits of the question they're proposing. So 10% I think is what's necessary over the 1500 right now. Thank you. Thank you, Councilor Dionne. Other feedback in particular on this issue. Councilor Rodriguez. Thank you, Mayor. We're specifically right now talking about the signature requirement. That's the section that we're gonna focus on. I think so, yeah. If we can follow Michael's guidance and walk through the memo and give reaction to where he's offered amendments and then we can weigh in with other thoughts and ideas but maybe taking these initial ones would be a good plan. Yeah, so on the signature requirement, I also think the 10% of the last gubernatorial race, I think that that's a good place for us to be at. I guess I'll leave it there and then I'll wait until we get into the next section. Okay, Councilor Zaro. Thank you, Madam Mayor. Yeah, just if we're talking specifically about number of the signature threshold, I would agree with the 10% to be in line with the state. I think if you're looking at the 2022 election, that would, if you take 10% of Portland's participation in that vote, it would be about 3,300 votes, which is I think a more manageable number of signatures. I'll hold my other comments and we're on the other items. Okay, Councilor Travarro. Thank you, Mayor. Quick question for our Corporation Council. For a charter amendment, is it already 10% of the gubernatorial? Or I'm sorry, for the votes required for a charter amendment? Right, if someone were collecting for a referendum on a charter amendment. Oh, that's a good question. I do not know the answer to that off the top of my head. I'd have to look at it. Is your suggestion that you would want that number to be the same or? No. No, I was just curious because I think that it is a higher threshold and I think it is based on the last gubernatorial. And I also think there's something with regard to how many people have to actually show up to vote to pass a charter amendment. So the idea being that the number of signatures required for an ordinance referendum have historically been a little bit less. My feeling is that we are discussing something sacred to democracy. And not every place in this country has a referendum process. But I think we are unique and it is a statement of our values in how we want the public to have access to democracy and how close we want our democracy to mimic a direct democracy that we have this process. I don't know, I have collected signatures in referendums in the past. I've done it for ordinances. I've done it for charter amendments. And it's not easy, 1500 signatures is not easy. It's not a walk in the park. You have to have organizational support. You have to have access to experienced signature collectors. And so the referendums that are making that threshold, if they're not coming from people that have that experience directly, they're coming from people who are connected to people that have that experience. So that's just, from my perspective, even 1500 signatures, you have to collect more than that. And you're talking 100 person hours to collect that many signatures. So the fact that we've had a lot of them is less reflective of the fact that it's too easy to me and more reflective that we have a significant amount of people that want to make changes, want to make policy changes through a direct democracy process. So I actually am not, I would not be supportive of changing the signature requirement. And I guess I can reserve, I can reserve the rest of my comments for later. Thank you. Thank you, counselor. Counselor Phillips. Oh, I'm sorry, I thought I lowered my hand. There we go. So I just want to make sure I'm clear. Somebody would have 80 days to get the signatures. Is that what it said in the ordinance or whatever in the petition I thought I read, they would have 80 days to get, right now they have 80 days to get it. Sorry, counsel. Yes, that's the current number of days for obtaining signatures, yes. So 80 days for them to obtain signatures. And are we thinking that we would give folks more time if we were requiring them going from 1,500 to 3,300 or is that not even on the table for a discussion? I think at this point, anything, I haven't put in, I mean, the general topics are topics that I've heard about from counselors and from members of the public through counselors. They're not, I think it's open for discussion. And so if you have other suggestions, I'm certainly willing to listen to them in the end, it'll be up to the council to decide what if anything to put on the ballot. Yeah, I guess for me, I mean, if we're gonna increase it, I mean, it's actually doubling. I mean, and it's doubling now with just the current numbers we have now, it could actually go higher than that depending on our next presidential election. So I'd love to hear how people think, but I would not be opposed to increasing the 80 days to hear something larger if we were going to require more signatures. Thank you. Thank you for that feedback, counselor. Next hand up is counselor Pelletier. Hi, can you hear me okay? Okay, I'm gonna share and hopefully nothing freezes on my end, like everybody else, the internet is not great over here, but I did wanna just echo counselor Tervaro's statements on the signatures threshold. I too don't think I would be in support of raising the signature amount based on the fact that I also think 1500 signatures is a significant amount. I think it takes a great deal of time and labor and skill to acquire signatures. And I also think, and I've said this a couple of times, but I don't think we're doing anything to address the actual issue of why people are feeling like they need to put citizens' referenda forward on the table. So I think if we're gonna raise the signatures or have a conversation about that, I think in tandem with that, we should also be having a conversation on what we've seen over the past couple of years from a government perspective and why we have so many people that are coming forward with referenda because they don't feel like they can work collaboratively with the council, which I think is a problem. And I think it is on us as counselors to have that conversation at the same exact time we're talking about revising chapter nine. And I also think too, just to add this, because I'm a little bit worried, my internet will just like cut out and I won't be able to share this at the end. So I know I'm jumping ahead a little bit, but I also think this is a really significant conversation and undertaking. I'm also not comfortable with putting this as soon as the June election. I'm not even comfortable with putting it in the November 2023 election. I think if we're gonna move forward in terms of looking at this, which a lot of the process was cited at our last meeting about engaging stakeholders, about having conversations with individuals who have put forward referenda, about having conversations with our community about what this course forward is. I don't think that we can do this in six months. I definitely don't think we can do it in two or three months. But I definitely don't think we can do it in six. So I'm in full support of taking our time with this, potentially looking at it from a committee perspective as well, before we just move forward with workshop first, read, second read. I think that that's a really, really quick movement on a really significant issue that is going to impact so many individuals, especially those who like I had mentioned in the last meeting feel really disenfranchised by our local government system. I think it's on us to do more work on this with the community members that have brought forward referenda in the past. So I just wanted to share all of that. Like I said, again, I'm gonna try and move to my phone, but on the off chance that I got cut off, I wanted to share that feedback as well. Thank you. Thank you, Councillor. Next to Councillor Fornir. Thank you so much. And I won't take up too much time. I pretty much echo a lot of what Councillor Pilatier said. I think to me, you know, we are seeing a lot of referendum and I know I have expressed in previous meetings that it's frustrating, but I don't know that the solution to the referendums coming up is to make it harder for them to come up. To me, they are a symptom of something else. They're a symptom of we are not engaging with the public in a productive way. And I think part of that is on us. And I was reminded of that a lot as I was in community with a lot of incredible leaders this week. And so I would be more inclined as Councillor Pilatier to really, we've talked about community engagement, we've talked about really wanting the public to be able to be a part of this process. And to me, this is a huge piece of that democracy as Councillor Tavaro mentioned. And so I would be more inclined to have this as a much larger discussion where we do have ample opportunity for the public to weigh in, but also if there is anything that we put forward for this year, I'm also not inclined that it would take impact this year. It feels very hard to do election work in the same year that it's going to affect the elections that are coming up. So I know I might be jumping a little bit far ahead too, but I'm a little unstable as it comes to the internet. So I just wanted to make sure to share that that I would not be inclined to change the signature count at this time. Thank you, Councillor Fornir. So I'm going to jump in. I agree with Councillor Tavaro that this is a very valuable process that we want to respect and care for both at the state level and the local level. I think that having access to citizen initiative is important. That said, I do feel like my, you know, when I came into this role in December of 2019, there was a real there was a there was a quick kind of moved. I think we had six or seven referendums on the on the ballot in in November. And and I think that really got people thinking about about the the role that it plays. And so I've been hearing a lot. So maybe my my perspective on this is just, you know, shaped by the last few years. But I feel like part of the reason that I brought this forward at our goal setting workshop is that I have been hearing from people that they want the council to take a look at the ordinance, which I think the last update to to the ordinance was in 1991. So I I thought that that was the spirit of me bringing it forward at the goal setting workshop in December was do we want to undertake this body of work? If we don't, that's OK with me, too. It has to be a majority of the council that wants to do this work. I would be comfortable moving to a state standard for or mimicking the state standard for signatures and there and the required number of signatures. But but again, if it's not if it's not a majority of the council that that wants to do the work, I think we need to we need to really put that out there. And and because we have plenty of other work to do, so I I'm trying to keep track of what everybody's saying and get a sense of how we want to move from this workshop tonight. But anyway, I guess I'm sharing a couple of things, both my context for how I'm thinking. And then again, in the last month or so having heard from several members of the council that I thought had constituted a majority of the council, but I could be wrong or people could be changing their minds and that's fine too. So don't want to waste anybody's time, but we can we can continue to, you know, talk about this the specifics and the particulars and see where people are landing in terms of timing and specifics. Council Mike, Corporation Council, you have a hand up. Yeah, thanks, Mayor. I just wanted to respond to Councilor Chavarro's question earlier that I didn't have the answer to, but the number, the petition number for a charter revision and that's that's 20 percent of the voters in the prior gubernatorial election. So anyway, I just found that in the statutes as we were listening, but for what it's worth. Thank you very much for that answer. Councilor Phillips. I I do agree with a little bit of what Councilor Chavarro said and also what Councilor Pelletier said with that said I would like to increase the number. I think fifteen hundred is way too low. But then again, I think thirty three hundred is too high. I don't think we have to go. I mean, I don't know you tell me. I think we're all just kind of putting it out there. We don't have to go with the state standard. We can come up with our own and maybe 10 percent. It is too high because again, I do totally agree with Councilor Pelletier that this is it's more than just increasing the numbers. It's it's community engagement and that we need to figure out. Obviously not in this meeting, but if we're just going to lay out everything at the table, then let's not do 10 percent. Let's come up with a number. You know, if we all agree to increasing it and it doesn't have to be the state. I mean, it could be whatever number we wanted to. But I do think I do think the fifteen hundred is a little low. Thanks. Thank you, Councilor Phillips. Councilor Zaro. Thank you, Madam Mayor. I know we have to be careful. We can't debate in a workshop. And that's one of the trickier parts of workshops. I don't I don't really know where to start. I personally don't believe that having a conversation as of the elected body of the municipality on raising the number. Moving it around, lowering it, whatever is a disenfranchisement of our constituents. I think having a considerable conversation and debate about if it should be in line with the state's policy is is quite literally our job. It's what we're supposed to be doing right now. And if the council decides not to do it, then that's fine. But I just I don't want us to be immovable. We didn't even get to the other five bullet points on the memo before we were all like, no. And I just don't think that that's particularly fair or democratic to our constituents. If we get to a point where we say, no, we don't want to do this, then that's totally fine by me. But I'm a little dismayed as I'm sitting here at the National League of Cities with every municipal elected official in the country who chose to come to say, nah, we don't we don't want to engage in this. So I mean, I get it. We're going to disagree on stuff. And that's totally fine. I I think we're supposed to and in obviously our work is to be rooted in trust for one another and trust that you're coming from a good place, just like I would imagine the same. But I don't know. I think I think we do need to have the conversation. And if even if we decide, no, we're not going to do it or no, we're not going to do it in June or November or not until 2025. Like that's that's what I think we're supposed to be doing. And I'm happy to be proven wrong. But if we need to just adjourn and move on, then so be it. But I know that there are several other bullet points on that memo and and lots that I think we should consider. So that's just me kind of jumping in and and moving away from the signature conversation itself. That's just where I'm at. But happy to to follow the majority of the council at this point, if we want to just say enough of this conversation. Thanks. OK, thanks, councillor Zaro. Councilor Rodriguez. I thought there was somebody ahead of me. Maybe not. You're the only hand up. I guess similar to what Andrew just said, I I'm not necessarily seeing our work here as disenfranchising. I actually have been looking at this as from the perspective of what is good policymaking process because and later on when we get into the the allotted time that needs to take place before the council can amend the policy, I think we'll get more into the substance of that discussion because ultimately what we're seeing is the impact of policies that have not had a thorough process that then we can not like change having, you know, a much more undemocratic impact because then it locks the elected body into inaction. And then people are here like, how come the council isn't doing something about this? And you're like, well, we literally cannot. So as I look at it from a policymaking perspective, I think that that is the way to have this conversation be constructive. When we start to talk about who we're disenfranchising, I think that inevitably I'm going to keep up like 100, which we're going to have to talk about who's been putting the referendums up and how disenfranchised they truly are when, you know, when we accumulate the number of signatures that they've had to collect in one election cycle and it's upwards of like 7000 plus. So clearly the the the ability exists out there for constituents to put things in about it and collect signatures. So again, my my interest in in doing this work is because of the what I want to have established is sound policymaking processes that ultimately achieve the outcomes that everyone in this community is looking to achieve, which is equitable outcomes for all of our citizens and being locked in into policy that no one had input for five years. It just puts us so far away from that goal. Thank you, Councilor Rodriguez. Councilor Diane, I feel like I see a hand go up and a hand go down. I just want to check in with you before we. Well, I want to say something, but God, Councilor Zahro and Councilor Rodriguez covered it so well that I'm just in the echo chamber now. So I agree with both their observations. You know, we need to look at this and we should go through the memo and give feedback accordingly. Thank you. No kidding. Councilor Palatier. Thank you. Yeah, it's interesting in these workshops because I feel like I've heard like we can't debate, but it feels like that's what we're doing. But I mean, there was a there was a call for feedback. So I gave my feedback on what we're talking about. I'm more than happy to go through the rest of the bullet points. I'm not saying we're shutting down the conversation. My feedback was pretty clear on I think that 1500 signatures is a significant amount. And I also think if we are going to do this, which I'll repeat myself, if we are going to do this, then we need to move forward with having conversations with stakeholders. We need to move forward with having conversations with community members who have put this on the ballot. And I stand by what I had mentioned in terms of people feeling disenfranchised by local government as somebody that felt disenfranchised by local government, who is now here in this environment. So again, I'm not shutting down the conversation. I'm very happy for us to go through it and go through the bullet points. I think it's very helpful. But I do think I don't want us to be rushing through this process if we are going to do it. I don't think that it's necessary for us to immediately go into a first read into a second read and then perhaps put it forward with the June election or the November election. So I just wanted to clarify my point on that as everyone is kind of sharing their feedback and that was my feedback. Thank you. OK, thank you. OK, so it sounds like there is is an interest in continuing to go through the memo. I haven't heard from everybody about the change that is before us with regard to the signature collection. Honestly, it based on my note taking it sounds a little split. So I'm not sure exactly what to do with that, but we can continue to make our way down through the memo. Counselor Ali. Thank you, Mayor. I will say and I'm going to make you quick because I have to go break my fast. Yeah, leave it there, please. I will say that. I hear just a second. Let's someone go, please. Give him a minute. Sorry about that. Yeah, I'm going to say that I got into here with the idea of. Increasing the signatures that we need to collect. But I have heard my colleagues saying that 1500 is enough. I'm not saying I'm agreeing, but I said I've heard them. What I would love to see us do is one way or the other. Balance what we hear from the community, from the people that we represent. Like many of you, I have had people, I've had phone calls, we've had emails like you guys are tying your hands and you making things difficult because I think at last council meeting we had a conversation about competing measures. And why did we have that? Why did the long laws brought forward collector signatures and want to amend something that was put in place? We had the same infotainment protection, I think, in 2020 or so. And then there was something wrong with it. And the council was not able to do anything about it. So there need to be another collection of signatures. And then it's going to be a cycle. So even if I'm not changing the numbers, I want to make sure that the council is able to work on something if voters pass something and unintended consequences happens because we all know whether it is a citizen's initiative or we on the council pass a policy or something. Sometimes you pass a policy and then you realize that, oops, maybe I was fasting like pious. So when I was proposing this, I didn't see what is going to happen ahead of time. Let me amend it and we can amend it. However, what we are right now what we have in the books, it's not going to be easy to amend anything also after five years when the citizens of the city have voted on it. So if we don't do anything at all, for me, I would love to have a conversation on how do we make it easy? Let's let people, let's give the citizens, I don't want to take anybody's, I don't want to disenfranchise anyone, but I want to make sure that the process is also equitable to all so that if something is passed by citizens, the council, because we are the body of an elected body, a body that have been elected by the members of this community, who have given us the authority to make policies. And if policies are not good, be able to amend those policies. So I don't want to take that away from us by keeping that five years. I would love to have that conversation. I don't know where I'm going to land on whether it is one year, six months, two years, but I want to have that conversation either through this workshop or moving forward. Thank you, councillor. No, I'm going to go eat. OK. Go for it. Councilor Dionne. And the rest of us don't get to eat pies. Is that the rule? You're not fasting. No, I'm God. No, that's the next year. Listen, I'm a little confused because Councilor Pellett here, I think made a good point in so far as so what's this all about tonight? You know, we can't give feedback how does the workshop actually proceed? I don't know. I mean, I think it's a combination of many things. I'll say that the idea of more signatures, I think if we really candid about it, it's a defense against the fact that we can't fix something that isn't right. If we had the capacity by process to amend a piece of legislation passed in direct democracy that just doesn't work. This conflict of law ordinances don't line up accordingly or we need to refine the focus of that particular initiative, then I would be less concerned about how many people it took to get it out to the voters anyways. And that happens a lot in the legislature. They pass a referendum and legislators go, that's nice. But we're going to fix it now. So it really works well. And they try to be loyal to the substantive policy that was behind the initiative. I think that's a it's a balancing act, but it could be accomplished. So I wouldn't be so animated about increasing the number of signatures if we designed a process where we could amend and or correct either a deficiency or an unintended consequence in the body of the referendum itself. Because we have to put that in public and the people that proposed that to begin with would engage us, I'm sure, with their opinion as to what they thought they were writing. And I'll just close with this to give you an example. I spearheaded a piece of legislation. I actually wrote it with the revisors. I represented a client predicated on that statute in front of a judge. And I said, judge, I know what this means. And he looked at me and says, no, you don't. I get to decide what it is you wrote and what it means. But no, I lost that hearing in front of the judge because he saw my language as meaning something other than what I thought it was. And that's why having the capacity as a body to correct what the well intentioned authors thought they were presenting is very important. So if they bring multiple referendums forward over the course of a number of years, that's not so important as our ability to edit, modify, or shape it. So it does work, as intended, and is at peace with all other ordinances that are affected by it. And we don't have that right. I think Councilor Rodriguez is absolutely right. People feel like we've handcuffed ourselves and we can't adjust policy to the realities of all the other ordinances that are impacted by that initiative. So and I'll close with this to Councilor Phillips. Yes, if we did 10%, I could be open to the idea that we would extend the signature collecting time because it is hard. Collecting signatures is hard. It's the unsung heroes of any effort. I get that. Or heroines. Sorry. So those are my thoughts right now. So really, if we could talk a little bit about our capacity and our ability currently and what could look like in the future, Michael, around amending a referendum that was ratified by the voters, that would be helpful. Thank you. Thank you, Councilor Dion. We have a hand up from our Interim City Manager. I just wanted to bring forward that from a staff perspective that has been really difficult putting forward in dealing with these citizen initiatives, mostly because the five-year rule really restricts us and does not allow us to deal, as Councilor Dion just said, with those specific changes that need to happen, potentially to make something work better from staff perspective or to address an issue that arises in the normal course of dealing. And so having that ability is invaluable from my perspective. I will say that lining up with the state law in terms of numbers of signatures makes a lot of sense to me just from a clear perspective, obviously, that's a policy decision for you all to make. But this ordinance, when I did a lot of research on it prior to coming into this role, it was enacted in the 1950s. It has only been amended a couple of times and it has not really been changed. So these signature requirements are old and they are based on a 1950s thinking about things. And so looking at this now and lining this up with state law and lining this up with requirements that are more in tune with what we have right now make a lot of sense to me because they do look at the bigger picture and they do address issues in terms of how we deal with this and how we deal with this as a city as also as a council, as a staff as well. So I just wanted to add that to your thinking. I mean, this ordinance has been around since I think 1954 was my recollection that was the year it was passed. And so it is something that has been in place for a while. It needs to be, it needs to be brought it back into the century we're in now I think and all of these discussions I think are very appropriate to be having and I would encourage the council to sort of look at it because we have received a lot of feedback not only from the outside but also from staff on the inside so that we can be able to address and deal with the needs of the council on a more, you know sort of nimble flexible basis which we don't have currently right now. Okay, thank you for that input from the staff perspective. Councilor Rodriguez. Thank you, mayor. Let me try the camera and see how it goes. I just, since it's getting late I didn't want to miss the opportunity to give feedback on the amount of time that has to take place before we can amend it in case we don't get there. One of the suggestions that came through email was really appealing to me which is to protect that any citizen of a friend of them that's passed in the ballot for two years and then to have a period where a super majority from the council could amend something that has been passed. So that's where I am at the moment feeling that I would like us to have a discussion about that timeframe. So two years protected and then super majority after that from the council to amend it. Thank you, councilor. So I think it's 7.30, it's not too late. We've only been at this for about 45 minutes. So if we could, I'd love to be able to go through the staff memo that was prepared and get some feedback and we can see where we land in response to the work that's been put before the council tonight. So a lot of good feedback on the signatures. I appreciate everybody's input. And I wonder if we can now move on to the next part of the memo, Michael. Sorry about that, mayor. Thank you. And actually, no, I had one quick question just while it's fresh on my mind for councilor Rodriguez about the super majority issue. Were you saying that was your suggestion there that an approved initiative could be amended by the council immediately by a super majority, but go ahead, sorry, I don't wanna speak for you if I'm getting it wrong. No, I think that the two years of not being able to amend it after it's been passed. And then after that, if we were to still look at the five year total that we were currently inactive the next three years of super majority. And then after that, it's a regular majority. Both could amend an ordinance. So three years, super majority. And then after that, that total of five years then it becomes an ordinance that we can vote with a simple majority. I gotcha, thank you. I just wanted to make sure I understood that. Okay. All right, so the next item on the memo was a review of the proposed ordinance summary and title of the initiative prior to placing it on a petition. And I think as the council knows, it was a fair bit of discussion about the summary and the title of a recent initiative. And so there's been a suggestion of including a review by the clerk's office. Councillor Fornir, Mike is on. Thank you. Yeah, but anyway, I had a suggestion for a review process upon the submission of an application prior to the petitions being circulated for signatures that would give the opportunity to the clerk and my office to review the ordinance summary and the title to make sure that they are consistent with the requirements of chapter nine prior to being circulated. So I don't know, I think, and I haven't carefully thought out what that process might look like. I know there is a process in the state law governing this issue. But I think right now the ordinance, I think as we discussed last week's meeting, the ordinance has a requirement for sort of neutral language to be used in the summary and in the title. There's also requirements. There's particular requirements in chapter nine itself that state what it can and cannot apply to, namely appropriations, the citizen initiative process itself and employee salaries and wages. And so reviewing that to make sure that it's complies would be, I think it would be the helpful step in making sure that what does end up on a petition. Complies and what eventually ends up on the ballot complies as well. So I'll leave it to you for thoughts on that. Great, thank you, Michael. Any thoughts or input from the council on that, that issue of staff review before signatures are collected? Councillor Dianne. I guess I'll jump, I was waiting. I think it makes sense. That way there are no narratives that come out of the petition process where people were confused or didn't understand what they were saying. At least we did our very best to provide clear notice language for the signatories to what they were signing on for. I mean, I guess not as good as what we write for the ballot measure, but at least it gives them some notice of what the petition actually is about as opposed to, you know, whatever the gatherers giving them as a story. Thank you, Councillor. And Michael, just to be clear, this application review lives in section E. That's where that language would live under. Sorry, yes, yeah, it would go under in that first, you know, section 936 of chapter nine. Yeah, most likely under subsection E where it would happen in between the time that a petitioner's committee submits an application for the clerk to prepare petitions. And when the petitions are actually put in final form and ready to be delivered to the committee and circulated for signatures. Okay, thank you. Any other feedback at this time? Sounds good to me, Councillor Tavaro. Thank you. I am so with the, trying to like, so right now the process, if somebody comes and wants to take out petitions, we like engage them in a conversation wanting to look at it. Is that true? But we just, we don't have like an official capacity that determines that. We have, there is, there can be, there are opportunities for the clerk's office and our office to review the summary, the title, the ordinance that's on there. But there's no, you know, but we are very limited in what we can do. I've had conversations before with petitioners groups where I've felt that a petition plainly violated the requirements of chapter nine. And I've suggested that to them. I've requested that they change it. I can't direct them to do that. There isn't language in the code right now that allows our office or the clerk's office to do that. And it's been, and the suggestion's been refused. And so you end up with, you know, with the possibility of an initiative that violates the, you know, the language that's already in chapter nine. And so that can be a problem. But the review can also be for sort of form so that a proposed ordinance follows the form of our existing code and avoids internal inconsistencies, things like that. So there are times where there can be a cooperative process between the clerk and me and the petitioner, but there's also times when it's not cooperative. Okay. And then the title, the council ultimately sets that. Is that correct? I feel like you did that. There is, in chapter nine, there is language in there that, you know, that directs the petitioners to include the title and summary on their application form. And there's also language in there that states, and I'm trying to find it as I look through, but it's essentially, and I think it's language that we discussed the other evening that requires it to be, bear with me, I'm trying to. It requires it, Michael, I think to be neutral. And yeah, that's the language, yeah. It just gets into, in my experience, it gets into this debate and it puts the council in a very strange position. As a lawyer and as the city manager, you have this provision that requires neutral language that you can't really amend because there's another provision that says that you're supposed to put the exact language that the petitioners put forward onto the ballot. So you have to try to balance that. So councilor, I would say that that has become extremely difficult. It has been a perennial issue. It has continually popped up as a problem, which is why having staff step in and really weigh in on, first of all, the fiscal impacts of whatever the change would be. Also the language itself saying, you know, the language is not neutral and here's ways in which you have to change it. Having staff be more of a gatekeeper, I think would be extremely helpful in this process. It's been a problem every single time there's been a citizen initiative that's been proposed, at least in my experience. We have not been able to change that. We have not been able to directly impact that because we do not have that ability right now. So that makes the process very, very difficult from a staff perspective because we have to go with the language that's presented to us from the petitioners and that becomes an issue. So giving staff more of a role in that and being able to present something that's a little more neutral or being able to look at things more broadly would be really beneficial in addition to that change to the five-year rule that would be extremely beneficial from a staff perspective. Okay, and so this language as it's proposed, it would it be like the corporation council ultimately has to approve it before the petitions come out. So it gives that final. So I guess I understand a staff perspective on this and I don't have strong feelings except that I do want to retain the substance of what the petitioners are trying to do. So if there's some way that we can kind of write that and that it's strictly for legal purposes or that we're retaining the substance of the issue. I don't know. Okay, thank you, Councillor Chavarro. We've got a hand up from our city clerk. I just wanted to piggyback off the convict that Michael and Danielle just made in. Right now, we asked the groups when they're submitting these affidavits to send the draft ordinance language to corporation council's office and have them look at it. And what we get back is yes, I already did that or whatever. Sometimes it is true and sometimes it isn't. So we have that sort of now. It's just we haven't had it enough where it's like a requirement that corporation council's office has to sign off on it. And the hope is that we would try to eliminate what happened last meeting where you guys are amending titles and or summary language because there's guidance already given to them about the neutral language and the title to not be misleading. That way when they are collecting signatures, everything is, it goes as smooth as it can be instead of groups coming or these individuals coming back complaining that what they were told is not what the ordinance language was. So that's all we're trying to do with this section. Thanks Ashley. And next to you Michael. Yeah, thanks. I was just gonna just explain some of the things that are in the state statute that govern the review process. And I'm just looking at it. This is in chapter 11 of title 21A governing petitions at the state level. But the types of things that the secretary of state office reviews are whether or not they whether or not the proposed ordinance conforms with sort of the general drafting conventions for the main revised statutes. And so, we would be looking for similar sort of conformity with the city code. Whether the numbers and as the allocation sort of whether the new proposed ordinance sort of integrates into the ordinance that it's supposed to be added to whether or not the things that we were discussing earlier whether or not statute sections, summaries, head notes in the proposed ordinance whether they objectively reflect the content of the proposal conformity with numbering sections things like that. So that's what the state law provides and it provides sort of a back and forth exchange between the secretary of state's office and the reviser of statutes which helps with the drafting and then the applicant sort of a back and forth until you get to the point where the parties have agreed that or that the clerk has made a decision anyway that the submission is consistent with those rules. Thank you both for that clarification. Councillor Tavaro, are you all set for the moment? Yes. Thank you. Okay, any other feedback on that second portion of the memo? Councillor Phillips. So, Michael, if I heard you correctly at the state there let me step back. I guess my in kind of piggybacking on what Councillor Tavaro said is the integrity of what somebody brought forward to you. And so they're bringing it forward to you and then I certainly understand the requirement they should go to corporation council to make to you to make sure the language is what it is and obviously go to the city clerk but then have it not go back to the person who initially brought it forward. I'm just worried that the language is not going to be the same. It's just to clarify that that I mean to the extent that we adopted something similar to what the state does you would go back to the petitioners before printing it on a petition and having them circulate it. So, in the end there is a requirement for not approval of the substance of the proposed ordinance but the format and compliance with the rest of chapter nine and once that's done the revisions would be approved by the petitioner group before anything is published and ready for circulation. I would be supportive of that because right now that's not in there, right? As one of the changes. That's right, that's right. Right now they're, we are, I mean- I'm just talking, yeah. Yeah, the clerk's office sort of handed this and a petitioner who is unwilling to make revisions can essentially force the publication of the petition. Thank you. Great, thank you. Any other feedback on that element of the staff memo? Okay, thank you for that, Michael. And it strikes me that there's support generally for that inclusion to see language that would be consistent with that recommendation. The next thing to talk about would be the fiscal impact statement. Do you want to tee that up for us? Sure, and I think this would be a fairly simple. This would not create an extra burden on the petitioner. This provision would present an additional burden on staff but for the city manager or the city manager's designee in consultation with staff that might be affected or the director of finance prepare a fiscal impact statement describing the financial impact that the proposed ordinance would have. And then including that potentially, including that on the petitions and also including it on the ballot as well. So that's the topic for discussion. Thank you. Danielle, you've got your hand up. Yeah, I just would add that I think this is really appropriate from staff's perspective because it's something that we've struggled with. We, a lot of these happen mid-budget cycle. And so it's difficult to mid-budget cycle be able to accommodate and address the needs of these various proposals. And so we've been talking a lot about ways in which to do that. Having the fiscal impact on the ballot so that people understand what is at stake here I think is very important that happens across the board whether it's a state or school or any other proposal. I think it helps the voters make a decision. And then I think it's passed. I will just add that something we've thought a lot about is maybe having this go into impact or go into effect for the next fiscal year because it is something that we haven't budgeted for and something we're not prepared for right now currently under the ordinance and the state or excuse me, the charter, we have to implement this within 30 days. And that is very difficult. It's something that taxes staff and it's something we haven't, like I mentioned, budgeted for. So looking at the fiscal impact is very important but also looking at implementation dates of when this would be effective. I think it's something that's very important for us as well because we wanna ensure whatever gets passed at the polls is definitely reflected and addressed by our various staff needs and our staff capacity, quite honestly. And it's not something we obviously are thinking about every at the beginning of the fiscal year because a lot of these things come into play about six months into the fiscal year. So that's the only thing I would address. This is something that I feel pretty strongly about. It's something we did for the last proposal. We were requested to have a fiscal impact statement by the mayor for the various proposals that were out there. And I think it was helpful to see what that would be in terms of when you're making a decision. So from a staff perspective, we would be very supportive of this type of a proposal and inclusion in the chapter nine. Thank you for that, Danielle. And next we'll go to Councilor Rodriguez. Thank you, mayor. Yeah, I just wanted to really quickly chime in that this is another one of the suggestions that I think makes a lot of sense for a lot of the reasons that interim city manager West just mentioned. And as I tried earlier to frame my approach to this work, it's aligned with good policy making process where we would look at both the implementation plan and the fiscal impact as part of the deep discussion that we would have into any policy. So this makes sense. And I would support it as it's been suggested. I will say, however, that I would just wanna make sure that the process by which we come up with that fiscal impact that it's as transparent as we all expected to be so that is not viewed as a tactic by the city to weigh in on a referendum, right? To set it up for success or fail. And not to say that that's either happened or will happen but as constituencies are interested in transparency, this fiscal impact could weigh heavily as with any other policy making process could weigh heavily on whether or not a proposal is supported or not by constituents. So as long as that process is transparent I see this to be a valuable addition to the process. Thank you, Councilor Rodriguez. Councilor Trobaro, and then I'd love to dump in. Thank you. I hate being in disagreement. And I do, I understand the value of this from the staff perspective. I just feel as though it is a mode of influencing the, I want to see if referendums make it to the ballot, I want to see the voters decide them based on the merits of the issue. And I feel like a fiscal impact statement plays into influencing the vote outside of the merits of the issue. So I guess I would not be inclined to support this measure. I would not be inclined to support this measure. I hear the concerns about having to, it's not budgeted and perhaps that's something that we can think about in terms of the implementation piece. Maybe that would help with it, but that's just not where I am right now. Thank you. Thank you, Councilor. I have, I am in support of a fiscal impact statement, I think because I think that's a very important point and I think because if we were to be developing policy at the council level, we would need to know how to pay for what we want to do, what we want to accomplish. And I see the value of that for any kind of policy making that happens because ultimately it will become an element of the budget. And I shared with the council earlier today a couple of things that I wanted to bring up tonight. And one of them had to do with this fiscal impact statement and the implementation piece. And again, some of this goes back to 2020 when a lot of things were approved by voters in November, there was a 30 day period to implement a number of amendments to city ordinances. And a lot of the implementation would have benefited from additional staff being hired in different city departments. And so I think what I was watching was the frustration on both sides. People wanted the implementation to be more thorough from the community perspective. They wanted to see more staff capacity to support the things that the voters had approved in November, but because we were mid budget, we didn't have the ability to hire new staff and to build up the staff in the offices that were asked to do more work as a result of policy amendment. And so I think that just from a really practical perspective that implementation piece of if there's an implication of the need for additional staff capacity to support the implementation of policy change, we've got to be able to build that in financially. And so I welcome the discussion and the thoughts here but that's where I have been on this is I appreciate knowing what the price tag is gonna be. Sometimes there are things that I wish we could take up at the council level in terms of policy making, but there's such a budget implication that it's not always an easy thing to do. And we know that we will know that more and more as we head into the next weeks in our budget. But anyway, that was part of the context for why it feels important to me and how it can be helpful in making our decisions about what we're able to do. And again, being responsive, if the council makes a decision and we wanna implement policy, we wanna see it implemented well. And I think the same thing is true from a community perspective. They want, if the voters are voting to approve something we wanna see it implemented really faithfully. So that's my input. Councilor Dian. I support the proposal for the fiscal statement. Listen, some people just thought on a social question inside a ballot, I get it, that's okay. And some people do look at the sticker. They wanna know how much this is gonna cost because they know either we're gonna cut services which we were facing that right now in the budget. And I don't know what our willingness will be to cut what we need to cut or we're gonna add in this proposal and they're gonna pay for it. I just think transparency is about telling people that there's a cost to their decision to expand services or shape new policy. Nothing is free and they just need to know what that is. So I think, yes, some they'll say this is why we can't do it because it costs too much money. Well, that's a legitimate political conversation. It's as valid as the social policy conversation that the proponents or the opponents might have. It's all part of the mix. And I think it's good policy in our part to incorporate that into a ballot initiative. Thank you. Thank you. Other input on the potential for a fiscal impact statement. Okay, we'll move on. The next in the staff memo, the next issue has to do with publication costs. So we talked about that a little bit earlier. Michael, do you wanna tee that up for us or maybe it's Ashley who would wanna speak to that? Yeah, Ashley, if you wanna give a little summary of... Yeah, I can talk on it. So right now it's required in chapter nine that we publish the full text of any ordinance or petition ordinance in the paper once before public hearing. So the entire text gets published. And then again, just before the election, it gets published again. So it's really costly to do that. This one that we just had for public hearing was $3,500. And we'll have to do it again just before the election. November, when we had five of them on the ballot, it was $16,000 each time. So it's a very costly thing. So I'm proposing that we instead of doing it twice, we just did it once and that the full text gets published just before the public hearing or the notice of the public hearing. So that individuals can see it. But then when we post our specimen ballots that is required, so sample ballots in the paper, that it's just what goes on the ballot. So we wouldn't have to post that notice of full text again plus our sample ballots. So there's just a lot of duplicate hosting that is very costly. Okay, thank you for that. Any comments or feedback on the issue of publication costs? Okay, nope, there she is, Councillor Phillips. I'm so quick on the draw. You can leave it up the whole time you're talking if you want. That's all right. I certainly understand the cost and I certainly don't want to cause us to spend any more money. But I know for me, I don't see things the first time. I just don't, you know? And so I know that there's a lot, right? We're publishing it twice, it's, you know, going here and there, I totally understand and I get it, it's expensive. But I'm just not that quick to see things the first time. So I'm not, I guess I'm not, I guess I'm 50% of the way there with you Ashley because I just, I certainly understand the cost but things go by me so like this. I could see myself seeing it the second time but definitely not the first. Yeah, and I get that. And the full text is also on our website at all times as soon as it's available. So individuals can click on it, download it, whatever. And then the full text is also available at each polling location as well as when individuals come in person and absentee vote too. So there's multiple places that the full text is available. You know, the biggest is that it lives right on our website under the elections and voting page leading right up to the election the entire time. So we do point people there when they call it asked. It's just the notice in the paper. And I get that some people don't see it the first time that they see it the second time but it is in more places than just the paper, just the twice. No, and I hear you. And I guess my other thing is is, dare I say, there's a lot of people that don't have the internet and make, you know, they just don't, they don't get it or they don't understand it. And I totally get it. I'm not, I'm certainly not trying to be argumentative or defensive. I totally get it and I understand. Thank you, Councillor Phillips. Quick question for Ashley. When we say publication in the newspaper, is that just the print version or does it also go online? Well, so it's both, it goes print version but then the newspaper obviously has an online publication of everything. Thank you. Councillor Zarro. Thank you, Madam Mayor. I think that I can see both sides of this argument. This is one of the ones where I don't know how I would fall on it. I'm thinking about my, a lot of my constituents in district four, I know more people are, they love their newspaper and I know, and I agree with Councillor Phillips. I think that it's, that's easy to lose. Even though I know, to the clerk's point, it's posted online. There are other ways to do it. I'm sure, I'm sure that that is there. So I think my only input on this would be, if in the event this moves forward to the council, if there's a general will to do that, I would wanna know like, all right, what are those other ways of mitigating that cost? Because that one for me, I just, I wanna make sure people are as aware of what's going on in anything, right? Whether we're talking about this or we're talking about something that's coming out of committee or anything. So this, yeah, this one's definitely one of the ones that I'm not sure where I fall on, but if there's any way we could get some, some guidance or a memo, Ashley, if this were to go to the council and just like maybe other ways that we are ensuring that this is getting out there to justify removal of one of the published, published components, then that might make me feel a little bit better. Thanks. Thank you, Councillor Ali. Thank you, Ashley. I think Councillor Ziru did touch on some of the questions that I'm gonna ask. Do we only publish it in press her out? Yeah, just part of the scope. Yeah, I know that there are a few, and I don't know if it's caused the same. There are a few free newspapers that I know that the older people folks in the city who may not have internet always rely on for news. So we may wanna look into that. And we may also wanna look at, is there any other way we can get it to people? I don't even know if printing it and sharing it is more expensive than publishing it in the newspaper. And also in the newspaper, since there are also other people that rely on online to see things, can we, does it cause the same thing to do an online only publication? No, it's, if we did online only, it is significantly cheaper. I don't know the price difference of, I have to get that, but it's the physical print that costs more than the online one. Yeah, maybe we might wanna explore the free newspapers, I know some of them are here. The free newspapers and see how many of them can we put in because they have like a very big circulation and then do the online on press herald. And then together, as I said, thank you. Thank you, councillor. Back to you, councillor Tarvaro. I'm totally open to not publishing it twice in the paper. I think that's a fairly antiquated method of publicizing. And I think when we do our press releases and it gets covered in an article in the paper, that's really when it's most likely to be seen and noticed. I understand requirements that we have to notice, but I'd be open to having maybe only doing it once and maybe only doing it online. Thank you, councillor Ali. Sorry, Mayor, I will drop my... Oh, I'm sorry. I thought you had... I had... No problem. Okay, so it sounds like there's reception to reviewing options. That's what I'm gonna say about that. It sounds like people are receiving this feedback from staff and receptive to considering some options here. Moving on, the last part of the staff memo has to do with the amendment element, which I know has been addressed a little bit, but Michael, I wanted to hand it back to you and then see if we can get some council feedback on the five year rule. Sure, thank you, Mayor. Yeah, I know council Rodriguez had commented on this issue earlier and Danielle addressed it a bit from sort of concerns from the staff perspective. But yeah, I think section 946 has the provision in there that states that the council cannot amend an ordinance and act it through the citizen initiative process for a period of five years after the effective date. And I think it's, well, it's a long time. And I think the question is, do we wanna leave it as is? Do we wanna shorten it, eliminate it altogether or attach some conditions as council Rodriguez had suggested, but it does limit, obviously, the council's ability to amend an ordinance in a way that the council is not limited with respect to other ordinances that go through the ordinary legislative process that the council follows. So I'll leave that in your hands, Mayor. Okido, well, thank you. We'll look for council feedback on that, that particular issue. Councilor Dionne, you can go first. I would do away with the five years. That's my druthers. But I wanna flip councilor Rodriguez proposition, Michael, so you can consider it is that in the first two years, subsequent to passage, modification amendment, whatever we wanna call it could only occur by supermajority. Because I think on the one hand, we wanna be faithful to the reality that it was passed by the public, but at the same time, the public feels it's incumbent on us to recognize if there are any inconsistencies, deficiencies or conflicts that weren't apparent during the voting process, for lack of a better term. So if we're gonna trespass into that space, maybe we need to do so with a supermajority. I just can't, and a lot of what Roberto says, I can agree with it, but I just can't abide by the idea that we know something's bad, but now rather than five years, we're just gonna sit back for two and just see what chaos comes from that. I think if we see there's something wrong, at least our constituents who voted in favor of the initiative would say they're only going in there with seven. It's not just a simple majority. And it's not easy to get seven of us to agree to anything, much less a simple majority. So I would like to see at least some process that would allow that to do, to happen, I should say. Thank you. Thank you, Councilor Dyon. Councilor Tavaro. Thank you. So this to me is the part of this that's really the problem. And I think that I would also be fine with doing away with the five years. My similar to my feedback about the review process in the beginning is just that if there's a way to kind of phrase it in legal terms that our authority to change it is specific to sort of non-substantive. So we're retaining the intent of the ordinance, but that we can make it workable for circumstances that might come up with staff. Okay, thank you. Councilor Zaro. Thank you, Madam Mayor. Yeah, I think Councilor Tavaro, I think I agree and we do this now to the point where we're not gonna be able to go in and change something significantly like when we're doing like summary language or title. I forget what the language is, but the, I don't know, the ethos needs to be there. But I do think that if there's like an administrative or a staff issue like fine-tuning and tweaking because it's just not working, then I think that makes sense. I think if I'm looking at it correctly, if you look at the last two rounds of referenda that we had, there were three citizen referenda in 2022 that were amendments or changes of previous referenda in 2020, but we couldn't change it. It's the only referenda could. So I think that is a good rationale to say, okay, well, instead of having, you know, referenda can only change referenda. I think that's a good scenario. I'm not exactly how we would phrase it where we get to go in and say, well, we actually do need to change this. And here's our rationale for administrative staff purposes. I mean, clearly the public is acknowledging that that needs to be fixed by virtue of the fact that they're going in and trying to fix it themselves with the only tool that they have available to them. And even I remember last year in committee, we were trying to do some of that, but it just wasn't fast enough and it ended up going out by referenda anyway. I'm supportive of some version of this as well. I think that five years is a lot too much. I think whether we're talking, you know, three years, two years, one year, I think I feel like a lot of people are in that area of agreement. And I think that, I mean, that's a big part of the conversation from what I think we talk about amongst ourselves and city staff and with the public of like, you know, hey, we want to act, we want to do something, we want to be responsive, oh wait, we cannot do that. So this I think is our path forward to getting there. And so I'm supportive of it. I don't have a specific number right now, but this is one I would be really interested in seeing where this council collaboratively and collectively gets to, whether it's the super majority in the first two years or upon year three or whatever. And Councillor Dianna, I agree, it is hard for all, you know, to get a super majority to agree on anything. So I think that is like, that's a nice extra layer to potentially add to this process, to know that, you know, it would have to be serious, it would have to be something that's really gonna require the full council's attention. So generally very supportive of this and would like to see something come of it. Thank you, Councillor. Next to Councillor Rodriguez. Thank you, Mayor. When I brought this up earlier, I honestly didn't think we were gonna make it to this point in the meeting. So I was like, just throw it out there. And I might have stated my position prematurely. I think that as has been acknowledged already, this is probably the most problematic aspect of the process right now. And so eliminating that time period where the council cannot act on a referendum that has been passed at the ballot is key. I said earlier that I would wanna protect it for two years, but hearing that either having a way to figure out how we're not impacting the substantive nature of the referendum, if we can figure that out, I'm 100% behind the idea of right from the beginning with a super majority being able to amend it. I find it challenging, however, to identify what a substantive change is, but perhaps in case by case we can figure that out, but that doesn't serve us well today when we're trying to set up the process. I will say that, and this is probably not necessarily important to our conversation, but politically speaking, a council is probably not going to, without much thought, discussion and transparency right from the jump, want to amend something that passed in the ballot recently. So I do think that there has to be a good case established for it being a bad policy, it having unintended consequences, or it being just poor policymaking from the beginning. So I'm open to us being able to work on it right from the beginning without any period of inaction that has to be stated. Thank you, councillor. Next to councillor Ali. Thank you, Mayor. I am going to repeat what councillor Dion said, you cannot get half of us to do something sometimes, let alone a super majority. So I would suggest that in terms of how long it will take for the council to amend anything that having passed by residents that we should come up with a number, make it straight. Forget about whether it is super majority or the first year, let's have a conversation and I agree to say that either two years, I'm open to two years or three years, three years so that we are fair to whoever it is that put the issue on the ballot so that it doesn't look like that. Even though we cannot decide for a future council, there is a tendency of a council that extremely don't agree with something and then residents pass it, even if there's no unintended consequences. If we say two years or a super majority, we all know how this council changes. Sometimes it goes all the way to this way and then another time it goes all the way to that way. And then a super majority can just take something that residents have just passed, right? And then throw it out because all of them or most of them don't agree with it. So let's work with a number of years instead of super majority vote or anything. We say three years, three years. If it is six to three, it passes, four to five, it passes. So that is what I would suggest. And if we can all talk about this and learn somewhere that we can all agree with. Thank you, even though Mark said that we cannot agree. Let's agree on something tonight. Okay, thanks, councillor. Over to you, councillor Phillips. I agree with councillor Ali. I mean, he said everything that I wanted to say. To have somebody go through all that work, you know, and then they have to get it, we're thinking about putting it in there for approval and the language has changed and all of that stuff. And then for us to just turn around and say we're gonna change it because of whatever reason, I agree, I think we should come up with a year as opposed to a super majority. And I also think that maybe this is where when interim city manager West was talking about it is, is some implementation plan. I do like that idea with that as well. And so maybe that fits in here as well or not, but I just think after all of that work for us to sit down and try to get a super majority, what, a month or two months or even three months after somebody or a citizen had gone through that, I think we need to give them their due time. This is a great conversation. Thank you, everybody, I'm enjoying it. I think that one of the things that I'm thinking about with regard to the amendment situation is sometimes there is an unintended consequence even from the drafters. And let's say something gets, it's written in such a way that's legitimate, but it maybe isn't exactly what the writer's intended. And then you get into a situation where you're litigating and trying to figure out what the intent was versus the plain language. And it could be, I'm just doing this for argument's sake, it could be that if you're required to wait a year or two years as a council to act, you could be tying your hands on work that actually the drafters of a citizen initiative would be in support of because sometimes these things are very complicated and they can have unintended consequences. So I guess I'm just acknowledging that there could be a situation where if we didn't have a wait period, but we did have a two thirds, for example, requirement of the council to take action that there's a possibility that you jump in and you fix something that should have been written, was incorrectly written. So anyway, I guess all I'm saying is that a wait period, I understand the spirit of it, but it could work to prevent the council from helping to address an issue that was perhaps unintended. So I'm flexible on this. I feel like it's the kind of work that we would want to, you know, as councilor Ali said, come to an agreement together on. I think five years is too long and that has been feedback that's been pretty consistent that I've gotten is that five years is too long. And as others have said, the amendment process happens out there at the ballot box rather than allowing the council to get in and make amendments. So I think five years is definitely too long. Whether or not we move through the path that requires a two thirds or a super majority or a wait period, I'm open to that conversation with all of you. Other feedback in this area. Okay. Like I mentioned, I reached out to the council earlier today and in the interest of just sharing information heading into tonight, I actually had an eight o'clock Zoom meeting this morning, a mayor Zoom meeting where constituents come in and talk with me about anything that's on their mind. And somebody brought forward this idea, which I shared with you all, which is the approval threshold. Should something be a simple majority or should a citizen initiative require a higher threshold of support within the community, greater than 50% plus one. So I promised that I would bring that forward as a talking point and ask whether or not there's any council interest in exploring the idea of having the approval of a citizen initiative needing to be greater than 50% plus one or not. So I open that up if anybody wants to weigh in on that councilor Ali. I have a clarifying question. 50% of those who went out and vote on that day or 50% of people who are registered voters. Yeah, the person asking was simply saying rather than have it be a simple majority to basically make its way into an ordinance change, should there be a greater threshold for approval? Oh, okay. I don't think I will support that because I don't want to make it more complicated for, and I also don't want to take that ability for people to bring in issues that they believe that the council is not doing or is going slow or maybe they don't think the council will move it forward and then they bring it to the citizen. I do want to keep that. I agree that we can increase the numbers. I also agree that we can change the how long it will take for the council to amend it. Adding another hurdle, I think will seem as if we're trying to stifle people from bringing this forward. I want to change it, but I also want to change it in a way that is equitable for our residents to be able to bring things forward. Thank you. You're welcome. Like I said, I'm not sure it's something I'm advocating for. I just wanted to be able to give it a conversation because it came to my door this morning. Councillor Trivaro. Thank you. I guess I'm leaning kind of where Councillor Ali was on that, I just am generally not wanting to kind of increase thresholds. But I do, I have a sort of a counter thought that might be in the same direction, which is that perhaps we could always have them be on November ballots so that the voter turnout was always going to be a spring ballot is a low turnout usually, especially on an odd year. So perhaps always requiring it to be on a November ballot might be a good alternative. Thank you, Councillor. Councillor Rodriguez. Thank you, Mayor. Yeah, not dissimilar to Councillor Ali and Councillor Trivaro. I don't know that this one appeals to me, particularly when I look at it from the same framing that I've used tonight, the good policymaking process that we're trying to clean up, that benchmark at the ballot wouldn't normally be part of the policymaking process. That's already kind of, so I don't necessarily see that as a problematic area to the citizens initiative process. I don't know that that appeals to me. I wanna sit a little bit with what Councillor Trivaro just threw out there because that did kind of resonate initially, but I wanna think it through more. Councillor Zirro. Thank you, Mayor. Yeah, I think my initial reaction for the 50 plus one would be, I think my initial reaction would be to just keep it as a simple majority, keep it a little cleaner and in line with what I think folks would expect. And then just per what Councillor Trivaro said, that was gonna be one thing that I brought up to the November ballot because I know that's a higher turnout, but I do think that sort of does get to it to make sure that you're having a substantial number of Portlanders show up for a vote, which kind of reaffirms, I think, some of the sentiment behind that threshold concern. Thanks. Yeah. Thank you, Councillor Dionne. I agree with what's been said. Elections are tough. Sometimes you do win by a percentage point. That's the way the system works. So simple majorities make sense. And I would be open to a discussion about moving certain questions in November election. That's worth having a conversation about just because of the voter turnout history tends to favor that cycle as opposed to a June cycle. Thank you. Thank you, Councillor. And thanks everybody for that conversation. I agree, I'm not pushing for anything different than the simple majority. And I think that thinking about voter turnout is a good way to ensure as many people have their say as possible, which of course is tricky because we do have a springtime election. And sometimes the timing is such that somebody or a group of people might wanna not have to wait. But yeah, I appreciate the conversation. And it sounds like there's interest in talking about the November election as a possible kind of pathway for citizen initiative. Other issues. So we've gone through the staff memo. I wanna open it up to people who have other issues they'd like to put before the council. Councillor Rodriguez. Thank you, Mayor. I just wanted to talk about the limiting citizens initiatives to a November ballot. That appeals to me because as we talked about, it has a much greater voter turnout. But when I look at the June ballot with the school budget always being there, they always want an advocate for, every couple of options of whether or not it is on the ballot or not. And to me, I kind of always liked that's in the ballot. What I don't like is that it is such a low turnout voting day. So the way that I viewed correcting that problem, it wasn't always to think of, oh, we should move it to a different day. But rather, how do we get, how do we educate our constituency into understanding that June elections are incredibly important, right? Your primaries are important. Your school budget vote is important. And anything that ends up. So to move it to only put citizens initiatives in November makes sense because of the current turnout, but it also kind of like, it goes along with this narrative of like, oh, June elections are just kind of not as important. And your in essence are promoting that low turnout because you've not raised the bar on it. So I guess what I'm trying to say is like, I'm really interested in promoting voter turnout, even for those June elections because they do have a great impact into who is being the representative body of our constituents. So I'd be more interested in figuring out how we can be good advocates for voter turnout instead of circumvent of a date that doesn't happen. Did that make sense? I felt like I'm really... I think it did, counselor. And I think it was really compelling information that you shared. Yeah, thank you, counselor Zaro. Thank you, Madam Mayor. I think the one thing that I would love for us to just talk about and Corporation Council and I touched base last week and this might be something that we talk about in the event this moves forward for Council action is the conversation around the paid signatures, people getting paid to collect signatures. That was something that came up a lot last week. It's something that there was a lot of concern about. There was folks really showed up and shared their experiences just in general. And there was a lot. I understand that there are some limitations potentially with case law and state statute that might prevent us from regulating this. But I would like us to have the conversation, discuss it, figure out what's possible if anything around prohibiting the allowance for paying for signatures on referendum because if it is in fact not allowed to prohibit that, then we are looking at a very different situation here where you could pay someone to get signatures whether it's 1500, 3500, whatever. That just changes the game completely, right? Because you monetized something. And I think that's very much a part of this conversation. So Michael, I'm not sure if that's something you were prepared to have a conversation about tonight. If not, that's totally okay. But I think we need to touch base on that at some point. And I think that it kind of makes sense that we're even talking about this in this workshop tonight because we were just having a conversation about clean elections and keeping money out of politics. And this feels like a good place to start. So that's, I just wanted to name that. Thank you, counselor. Michael, do you have your hand up to respond to that? Just briefly, I think as Councilor Zarrow mentioned that I do have some concerns about that. And if I know there is some case law that prohibits those types of restrictions, if it is something that the council wants to continue to explore, we can do a little bit of deeper research. A lot of just given the time constraints so far, there are a lot of moving parts, as you all know, from this discussion, a lot of complicated issues that we're talking about. And we've done sort of, you know, some initial research on a lot of these issues. We haven't really done a deep dive on some of them, but we can continue to research them if the council is interested in us doing that. Thank you. Councilor Ali. Yeah, I should have written the first in the reason why I raised my hand, I didn't. Now I've forgotten that but I wanna comment on the issue of paying how do you get people to collect signatures? I mean, I don't know what to say to that. I think every aspect of our democracy have some money connected to it. Whether it is a canvassing, you buy Plum Card, that is money, you do yard science, that is money. If there's an issue, we are trying now, how do we call it to regulate or to amend this issue? I think we should try to balance it because there might be an issue that a few people, some people in the community do wanna change because the way it is done doesn't work for them. And let's say they all have, they're all working so they will not be able to go out and collect signatures. I think it will be fair if they can afford to hire someone to go and collect their signatures for them. I don't see that as any different from action volunteers to go, the only thing that I will not, or I would love to see change is if the people who are collecting the signatures local or they are from somewhere. Because in addition to paying them, there need to be some sort of like a distant impact to me. So I'm gonna collect these signatures even though I'm being compensated to collect that signatures. And then once if I am given, even though it's something that I'm doing and I'm just saying it from my perspective, there was an issue with the recent, how do we call it? The recent referendum that we just discussed at the last council meeting that some of the people that were collecting the signatures did share information that is not accurate. Okay, is it because they were hired or is it because they were trying to get the signatures so that they can get money? So we can put something in the books that says that if you misrepresent, I don't know if we're allowed to do that. You misrepresent what is on the ballot to people so that you can get signatures that signatures can be removed when it gets to where they are counting. If Mr. A or Ms. B comes forward and say that this thing is about watermelon but the individual told me it's about oranges because they know I don't like oranges so that I can sign it. If the person comes forward and can prove that that is what was said to them, they will remove that from the, they can request for their names to remove. I rather do that than say that people cannot hire. I mean, that is creating a job during election. You get some people to go around and collect signatures and then you pay them for the work that they put in. I think because it's not any different from somebody doing a website for you or somebody designing your palm card or somebody doing some campaigning for you and then they got paid. So I will not be supporting anything that will remove that. Thank you, counselor. Michael, quick question for you. Is there any prohibition at the state level with regard to paid signature collectors that you know of? I don't, no, and I'm just looking in the state statute right now. There is a provision, bear with me, I'm sort of skimming through it, but the short answer to your question is no, there's no prohibition on paying. And there is, as I mentioned earlier, there is some case law that prohibits governments from enacting legislation that restricts a petitioner group's ability to pay circulators. So there are provisions that we can put in place and maybe strengthen them a little bit with respect to certifications that we get from circulators and from petitioners groups. And maybe that's another approach for the council to consider. Thank you. Okay, any other issues from the council that we wanna talk about? I actually wanna go back to page one of the memo and there is an element under the petition signature requirement that talks about a possible amount of signatures that would need to be gathered within districts. And I wanted to come back around to that just to get a little bit of clarity on what that might look like. So I think I understand the intent would be to make sure that we spread the signature collecting around the city so that we have good representation from all parts of the city when it comes to citizen support for getting something on the ballot. But I thought I'd ask the question or get a little deeper in there, Counselor Zarrow. Thank you, Madam Mayor. That somehow slipped by me after all of our agenda items for the evening. That was something that I know I had discussed with Corporation Council as an off-peninsula counselor. I know oftentimes it can feel like our districts are not always included in conversation. So for me, when I had that conversation, it was in the context of, well, maybe we can have this, explore this. What would it look like if we were to take, and this would be in the context of, if we took a percentage, if we were to align with the state and we were a percentage of that percentage, a certain percentage would come from each district. And so that's pretty much as far as it came in. The concept was to look at the districts through a lens of equity so that those who live in D5 and four feel like they have the same seat at the table that one and two have. And that it's much easier to go and stand at an intersection that's very busy downtown and collect a signature, whereas district counselors have to go door-to-door to get signatures when they run for office, right? So it was in the vein of equity and making sure that we're seeing each district the same. So hope that was helpful. That is helpful. And I'm sure you didn't mean to leave out district three. So I'll just add that. And the good people of district three, my apologies. I'm just teasing you. Thanks, Kate. Councilor Rodriguez. Thank you, Mayor. This one, it's interesting because at first my initial reaction was that it made sense to have this geographic kind of benchmark, particularly in an aim to try to achieve equitable distribution of who you're interacting with to get things in the ballot. However, geography doesn't, particularly in this town, doesn't necessarily advance equitable representation. So you could still be very much, I mean, I would be really intrigued to find more information on who are the signatures, the people that are assigning and see exactly who is being represented in these initiatives getting on the ballot and what really, how can we measure equity in terms of the signature collection? I don't know that the process lends itself for us to do it the way that I would want it to. When we're looking at equity through both a race lens of an identity lens, a gender lens and all the other different ways that equity could be measured in terms of identity. But geography seems to not necessarily get us there. However, I do see some issues being very district specific and when those come up, perhaps it would be disadvantageous to the process itself and certainly to the folks that would be most impacted by the issue to have to go across town to get signatures for something that might not impact them. And I'm having a hard time actually thinking of an issue that might be very narrow in its impact in terms of geography, but in case it does occur, it would seem overly, it would seem too much to ask for folks to cover all five districts and their signatures. So I'm not necessarily all in on that proposal as it stands. Thank you, Councilor Dionne. Deja Vu all over again. Councilor Zahraud is such a great recap of the Republican position in this battle about petitions where us folks in the second district just can't get a fair shake. We live in rural areas and neighbors are so spread apart and the first district is controlled by everybody flooding the city of Portland to get their petitions, right? They won't even go to Bangor, it's too far north. So there was this idea that if there was a state initiative, I think this one was about bear hunting. So something that's at the forefront of our thinking here in the city, they thought petitions should be gathered on a ratio across both districts or it wasn't a valid petition. It was beaten back. I would say the same thing here. We are all residents of Portland, you know? You get your signatures where you can. The equity issue for me is resolved in the ballot box, you know, our votes in district five count as much as the votes in district two. But I'm not concerned. As long as the signatures are gathered in a fair manner, you know, they're certified and sent on for election fine. As far as being candidates in these far flung rural outposts we call district five and four and three, I don't know. Yes, it's a little bit more work, but you learn to go where the crowd is. It's just a little easier downtown to do that. But I couldn't support a proportional requirement that a percentage has to come from each individual district. We have enough parochialism. I don't want to encourage anymore. And I'll be looking in the budget this season that we do get more of a fair share this time on daring than you all get downtown. You see how it gets all divisive so quickly. So that's my comment on that. Thank you, Councillor Travaro. Thank you. I'm similar to Councillor Dianne. I think policies of geographic requirement in terms of democratic participation generally tend to favor minority perspectives. And I don't mean racial minority. I mean minority as opposed to majority in a democracy. I mean, the electoral college is a good example of that. How many presidents have we had that didn't get the majority vote of the public because we give favor to rural districts? And so I think that it could play out similarly here. You could have four districts that you get the required signatures and then you get one where you don't. And so that one kind of has an outsized advantage in terms of deciding policy. So that's just where I am on that. Okay, everybody, thanks for feedback on that front. Any other? I'm gonna say that I'm not hearing great support for that but I appreciate the conversation as with all things. So we've made it through the memo. We've made it through other things that people have brought forward. I think we're at the position now in this workshop to talk about process. So I, along with you all, want our process to be thoughtful and transparent and inclusive on all things. I think we all need to work to bring things forward in a way that feels accessible and transparent. And so I think we need to have a discussion at this point about where we go from here. So it's March 27th. We could move to a first read on amendments to chapter nine and contemplate council action in a month. I heard at the beginning of this conversation that that was worrisome for some folks. So what I wanna do is ask you all to give me feedback on where we go from here. Thank you again for thoughtful input on the workshop content as proposed this evening and as presented this evening. I think that after initial discussion, we got into the substance, which has been a good thing. But now we need to talk about process and earlier in the discussion this evening, somebody mentioned committee work. And I will say that back in December, when I was talking to you all at our goals setting workshop about chapter nine and possible revisions, I really thought of this as work that could be done by the council as a committee of the whole, which essentially is what we do when we're in a workshop because it's such a big body of work. And it would be something that we would be putting on the ballot, not deciding ourselves. So I do have a preference for working this subject together as a committee of the whole. But I look to you all for your feedback. Again, what I put out in terms of a possible timeline is a possible timeline, but anything can change. Any number of things can get changed by us as we determine them to, we can speed them up, we can slow them down. So councilor Travaro. So I'm thinking that a timeline with the goal of having something on the November ballot feels a little more transparent to me at this point. I just feel like there may be a perception out there that this is kind of rushed through to a spring ballot, which doesn't have the turnout that a November ballot would. And I just think for the sake of that and for the sake of us being able to kind of come together to something that we can all support November feels better. Okay, thank you. Councilor Ali. Thank you, mayor. I'm not gonna speak to that, Easton. I just have a question for Mr. Goldman. Aye. Yeah, and I can do email if that is much easier because with past what I'm gonna say, I was gonna ask if we are allowed to say that signature circulators should be residents of Portland. You don't have to answer that. Now, if it's gonna be something that you need to do research, I wouldn't mind an email saying yes or no. If it is yes, I want it to be part of the conversation. If, I'm sorry, if signature circulators should be Portland residents. We can do a little bit more research on that. I think my thought right now is that they would need to be, and I think this is consistent with what the ordinance currently says, is registered main voters. I think what we have right now is that the petitioners have to be registered Portland voters and circulators, which I think is consistent with main law right now, would have to be registered main voters. I think that's a good point. What we would say right now would have to be registered main voters. And we can do a little bit more digging into that before, as we go through the process. Okay thank you very much. Thanks counselor. Counselor Pallett here. Thank you. Just really quick in terms of process and timeline, which I said in the beginning, but yeah, I think a June ballot is way too soon. even a November ballot. So it only gives us six months. That's not a lot of time. And I think when we were talking in health and human services and public safety about potential revisions to chapter 35, which would also have to be a change within the charter, we cited that work as taking potentially a year to talk about and to really work through. And I think if we're going to do the appropriate amount of community input for something like this in terms of changing chapter nine or potentially changing it, that we need to look further down the road. And I'm inclined like I had said in the beginning to a November of 2024 election, which I believe will also be a presidential election. Because I think this is like a great starting point for us to have a conversation about, but I still think there's a significant amount of conversations and work that needs to happen before I feel like we could just immediately move forward. Um, move forward on this. So yeah, I'm in the party of taking it really slow. And then also just recognizing that we didn't actually cite this as a council goal. I know that was already said, but we listed our goals out and we didn't prioritize this as a goal. So with all of the things that we have coming up over the next several months over the next year, I don't know that this is an immediate priority because the rest of the council didn't list it as an immediate priority. So because of that, I think we have some time. And I think it was it's important for us to to remember that as we move forward and say like even if we do push it out to 2024, I don't think that that's a disservice. That's in a year, a year and a half. So I think we have time, but that would be my preference. Yeah, and hopefully I didn't mischaracterize. I certainly wasn't implying that it was decided on as a goal. It was brought up during the goal setting workshop, but we didn't really pick it up from there. So I was getting the sense that it was a priority, not a goal, just like other things that we bring forward into workshop or into the council's work, maybe priorities, but not listed as goals. But yeah, I appreciate that feedback. And I wanted to bring this up, get it in front of the council, see where where people want to land. So again, looking for people's feedback on where we go from here. Counselor Zahra. Thank you, Madam Mayor. All right, so I guess first I just want to say thank you to everyone and all of our colleagues here. We really did dive into it. And I just appreciate it because it feels good to get to the end of something this substantial and see things from a slightly different light and understand where everyone's coming from. So I just, I do genuinely appreciate it. Going into this, I was more inclined to want to address this in June. I feel like there's a lot of conversation going on around that. I think that city staff has given us a lot of their perspective. We have lived experience, we hear from our constituents. And that's, for me, I can obviously only speak for myself, I feel like we could do that. And we could do it in a way that involves the community. I'm happy, happy to be proven wrong though. I mean, if that is not the case, then I'm certainly not, you know, immovable there. I'm hearing our colleagues say that they do have concerns about that though, and the timeline is fast. And I do hear that. So I think I would be okay with this November. That would also be in line with if we were to say that we want to include in it that referendum would only be able to come in November. That would be true to what we would be recommending. But I mean, I will defer to the majority. But yes, coming into this, I was certainly more inclined for this June. But after listening to colleagues, I think, you know, to take my own advice, I want to be movable and flexible as well if that makes people more comfortable on the council. And if it gives us more time to work through it, because it is serious. And I know we do take it seriously. So that's where I'm at right now. I don't know how helpful that is, Mayor. Thank you. Thank you, Councillor. Councillor Ali. Thank you, Mayor. I think I will be leading more towards June. And my reason is that how do we call it? Once this goes on the ballot, it will generate a conversation that is needed between now and when we agree, we have like about a month. When we vote on it, we have about a month. We can have a public comment. We can get people to show up and give us their feedback. And we also do amendments on the floor. If someone tonight, I had people sharing some, some ideas that was shared by constituents. So I'm sure that a lot of constituents are watching. The reason why I'm saying we should do it this June is I can't wait for November or for next year. Because the issue of putting things on referendums have become so, I cannot count how we got the number of constituents who have reached out to me or who have made me run into me in town and say that can you guys do something about this? I believe that this is, we should have done this since yesterday. Last year, we're talking about it. I've forgotten what I think Mayor, you and I have had a conversation. And I said that because of all the referendum questions, I don't want to put something that would look like we are trying to use the same ballots to influence the way people will vote. So I think we've been talking about it for almost a year. And our constituents, whether those who agree with us on this or not, have been talking to us about this, whether to say to us that no, you cannot do that or you can do that. And I think a lot of people know that we are going to have this conversation today. Last, last, how do we call it, last Monday when we're having the council meeting, this came up. I don't remember if we said we're going to have this conversation today, but a lot of us mentioned that we're going to look into putting this on the June ballot. So people are away. I hope that more people will engage us on this in the next few weeks before we have our final vote on it. So I will lean more on putting it on the June ballot so that I'm done with it and move on. Yeah, thank you. Thank you, Councillor Ali. Councillor Dion. Thank you. I think the process committee as a whole makes sense. I'm going to join Councillor Ali with June. I mean, we just, we have to do the work. We have to make some decisions. Public engagement will occur if we post these meetings and they come. I mean, I think the public elects us to make decisions. It's that simple. These are pretty straightforward. Either you're going to agree with the proposition or you're not. I'm okay with that part of it. But I think we can move along and get to June. You know, thank you. Thank you, Councillor Dion. Councillor Phillips. Yeah, without due respect to my fellow councillors, I think June is way too fast. You know, I keep hearing, you know, process, process. We have to process it and we have to give people time and we can't rush things. And here we are trying to rush something as important as Chapter 9 out there because we're tired of talking about referendums or because people have come to us and said that we need to have, we need to do something about this. So I think June is way too soon. I mean, to put it on, to put it on, you know, to have a first read in two weeks. I think it's, I think it's just too soon. You know, and the other thing I've heard is, you know, we always have to do things through committee or things should go back to committee. And yet here we are and we want to rush this through in June. So I don't think we should put it on the ballot in June. I tend to kind of agree with Councillor Pelletier. Let's take the time that we need to really take a look at this. It was not necessarily a priority or a goal. I don't know what the rush is. There probably have been umpteen thousand conversations that I'm just coming into it. But I don't know if you probably did have conversations about Chapter 9 before I got here, but this is my first conversation about it, which again, I totally agree with councillors. I always been extremely helpful to go through this process and really take a look at it. There's umpteen thousand things that we talked about tonight regarding this chapter, and that was just a little bit. I mean, there was just a lot of different things. This is a huge issue. And we talked about four or five different things that we would possibly change in this. And so I think that putting on a due ballot is way too soon. I could possibly be convinced to put it on a November ballot, but that does not get back to Councillor Pelletier's issue about why we continually have a referendum. So I'm not sure when we're going to talk about that regarding the community engagement piece of it. So again, I mean, I agree with Councillor Pelletier. Let's let's let's put it out there. Let's really go through it. And again, I could be convinced to put it on a November ballot, but there's a lot here. Thank you, Councillor. Councillor Fornir. Thank you so much. And first, just thank you to everyone for their engagement. You know, it's been a long one. And I appreciate it. I would be inclined for my fellow councillors to vote more towards November. I think what we've been talking about is being able to have good public engagement. So we're making good policies so that it doesn't have to be revised. And so I think being able to take the time to really think this through, there are, as Councillor Phillips just mentioned, a lot of different areas of this law that we just talked about that we may be changing. And that's a lot of changes. For me, it just feels like June was really too fast to do that to have the right amount of public engagement. And I definitely agree with Councillor Dianne that, yes, everyone elected us to be in these offices, but what we've heard through public comment for the emails we get is that people still feel sometimes left out of the process. And so I really want to honour that and make sure that if we're going to make some substantive changes to this rule that we're taking the time to really walk it through. So I would be more inclined for that later this event. Thank you. Thank you, Councillor Rodriguez. Thank you, Mayor. So I guess I want to, before I say what my preference is on the timeline, I want to say in regards to our goal setting, I feel like I'll speak for myself. I would say that I dropped the ball, so to speak, because it was framed and I certainly had the interest, but I didn't act on it. And my sense is that there are some of the other Councillors that have expressed interest in taking this on now might feel similarly about, you know, the missed opportunity to tackle it as a goal setting exercise. And if we had done that, June, to me, would have seemed like a reasonable timeline to put this out there. Now, owning that I dropped the ball in what I now look at the right place to have brought this up initially. And what I think is a more friendly timeline to a diligent process, I'm leaning more towards a November ballot. But if the Council, I wouldn't be completely opposed to a June ballot. I don't think that two months from now is a very short period of time. It's not ideal. But, you know, I won't go too deep into this, but when I think about public engagement and the barriers that folks have, the real barriers that folks have to be in engaging government, you know, timing one of them, right? Folks that are disenfranchised are disenfranchised. We're not going to hear from them. There are systemic barriers to them being involved and it don't have to do with whether June or November ballot. It literally to them, that would be relevant. So I just think that the folks that will be involved will appreciate us moving into November. And so for that, and again, as a way to own my own shortfall of not raising this up in a timely manner, I will feel comfortable waiting until November. Great. Thank you, Councillor. I hear my colleagues. I think a majority of, well, I know a majority of people are saying, let's look to the November ballot as a goal. I think with all things, we do our best to set out a process and achieve the outcome that we're looking to achieve together. We could get to the point in time where we need to settle on something in order for it to be on the November ballot and say, for whatever reason, it's not going to work. So I think, but what I'm hearing from people is from a process development perspective, we're going to slow this down and endeavor to get council action so that the voters would be able to react to some council work on the November ballot. Seems clear to me that that's the will of the majority of the council. And that's totally fine with me. I'll just offer some comments. I do think that hearing from some folks on the council who have been here the longest, maybe what that illustrates is that there has been a lot of talk. And I have felt the pressure to do this work for a while now. But again, that's just my perspective. And I'm in my fourth year. So it's different, maybe depending on the time that we've been here and the feedback that we've gotten from the community. But that's the way council work happens. And so that's fine. I find myself making notes because what I'm realizing is I sometimes say I'm damned if I do and I'm damned if I don't. On the one hand, we're elected to work and act. And if we don't act fast enough, sometimes we're told that that's the reason people want to put things on the ballot because the council's not acting fast enough. But if we act too fast, people will say you guys are leaving us out and that's not enough process and that wasn't well done. So you're damned if you do and you're damned if you don't. But I think the thing that's encouraging about tonight is that we're talking about it. We're trying to get a sense of the will of the majority of the council so that we can build process that feels right to people and that we can move it at a pace that allows us to do good work together. I think that we could build a process that's a month long and in certain circumstances people could say that's plenty of time. We did a workshop, you had a first read, you had a second read, you're good. We could be in a situation where something comes forward, an amendment, or some other issue to consider and we're acting in real time practically, right? I mean there could be no first read, no workshop, it's an amendment on the floor and we act on it. So I mean this is the nature of things is that we can't be 100% consistent when we talk about building process but I think that what all this talk that we've done about process over the last week or so has really been focused on are we building the right process for what's before us tonight? Again, whether it's an amendment or a council action, are we doing our best given what we know about where we are and what we're doing? And so what I hear from my colleagues tonight is when it comes to issues associated with Chapter 9 and the changes to initiation and referendum provisions in that portion of the code, this timeline isn't right. But again, it could be the right timeline for another matter. So I guess I'm pointing that out only because from where I stand sometimes it would be great if we could say this is the standard by which we always manage process. But we don't and we can't and that's just the nature of the work. But talking to one another and sharing why the process and the timing works in any given situation I think is helpful to me and I think it's helpful to the community too as we figure this stuff out together. So anyway, I think what I'll my sort of next steps are at this point to work with city staff to figure out when we come back again with a hard look at a revised ordinance so that we can begin to discuss the specifics as ordinance amendments with one another in a workshop that hopefully, you know, gains community input and and attention. Councillor Ali. I will let the next person go. Okie doke, Councillor Zarro. Thank you Madam Mayor. I appreciate you trimming in and kind of, you know, wrapping all of that together. That was quite a bit that we've discussed and you sort of sparked in me, you know, I guess one thing that I would want to throw out to colleagues for, you know, the argument for November would be like what what exactly is that engagement going to look like? What is it we're going to what is it we're going to we what we want to do? We want to make sure we're going to do what boxes are we going to check that, you know, November will accomplish that June will not. And yeah, whatever those are, I just I want us Mayor to to kind of make sure that those are a part of it so that we can hold ourselves accountable because I wouldn't want us to because this this evening is, you know, while it's late and I'm hungry and I really want to be done. We've actually done a lot. We've really engaged. This is one of the healthier conversations. I think I can recall that we've had together and that's why I'm so appreciative. But I guess what's the next step? What's the next conversation? Is it going to be the hard line ordinance that you've that you've written that we're now going to look at? We're going to say what works? What doesn't? Are we going to walk it out to everyone and say what do you think? And I guess the last thing again is just what's the difference between, you know, that in June versus that in November and that there doesn't need to actually be an answer to that. That's just kind of like for for me. I also would want to know like what I'm going to say to constituents who are saying, Oh, what happened? What happened from the workshop? What what's next? Thank you, Counselor Zaro, actually that I really appreciate you bringing that up. I'm a little tired too. So I I'll use all the help I can get. I do think it's important for people to be very concrete in terms of what is the community engagement process that you'd like to see so that we can achieve that together. If you leave it up to me, I might just schedule another workshop. So or I might do something different, but I welcome your engagement and I want it. You're making me think of the the DUSON rule. When I was first the first year I was on the Council and overlapped with then Councilor DUSON, the the rule that was sort of named in her honor was if we're going to postpone something, what are we going to learn between now and then that's going to change your action? So I think in a way that's what you're saying, Counselor Zaro, is if we don't feel that we can act on this for the first read on April 10th and a second read on April 24th, what is it that we that we need to do or that we need to learn between now and when we have to act to put something on the November ballot, which is typically in the summertime? What do we need to do? So I think that's a great prompt and I welcome it and if it doesn't happen in real time tonight, I really encourage people to reach out to me or to the City Manager or to Corporation Council to voice what it is that you want to see concretely so that we can make sure that we're not that we don't miss out on good process that people feel they want to inform. Counselor Ali. Thank you Mayor. I still don't remember but I will use this opportunity to chime in about how do we call it my call for an office of civic engagement or community engagement. This conversation have proven that we really need that. So I don't know if the City Manager is here. I know that it is not going to be able to make it to this year's budget but we shall consider that next year. Thank you. Next we go to Counselor Rodriguez. Thank you. I know everyone's dying to get to get done with this and I almost hesitated to raise my hand but I didn't want to lose the opportunity to address on Counselor Zarros prompt what we gain from what we would be gaining from the additional time. You know I honestly I don't think that there'd be a lot to gain. I think it'd be more of a aesthetic thing where it just looks better. I was just telling Counselor Travorro you know to truly you know we will always until we break down the barriers that are keeping people from participating in government we'll always be engaging with the same group of people. It will just be at a different day and a different time but what keeps people from being engaged in our work the systemic pressures that keep people this like I said this enfranchise you know we're not going to fix that neither in two months or in six months so I don't believe that we'll be gaining a ton but it looks better and I hate to be blunt I hate to keep like I said earlier I'm going to keep 100 and keep a buck with y'all and it just looks better but we I doubt that we'll be gaining much more in the process and that's just where I'm at. Okay thank you Counselor. Well at a minimum I think that we will reconvene to review chapter nine in workshop there's no reason that we can't build in a workshop that contains public comment the way we did with clean elections which doesn't mean that the community shouldn't reach out to us anytime you know one-on-one with emails and input in that in that way but I'll summarize by saying I think we're we're taking up this body of work we're doing it as a committee of the whole that this is council work that we can do alongside the work that we do coming out of committee in response to our council goals with the budget with the hiring processes that we've got on our radar it's work that we will schedule and that we will do alongside all the other priorities so I'll work with staff to get something scheduled but again I look to my colleagues on the council to please reach out if you have creative ideas for how to engage people differently and meaningfully and we will do our best to to make sure that an action coming from this council on chapter nine is transparent and informed and the result of good work so I think we can end tonight's workshop there I can hardly speak it's been a very long day I'm not feeling well I put on my down jacket mid-meeting because I'm freezing so I apologize if I'm a little loopy here at 9 18 p.m but I do really want to thank everybody for your input and your thoughtful contributions to tonight's workshops and in the earlier council meeting and we don't need a motion to adjourn so I will just say this workshop is adjourned and I hope you all get some sleep tonight and I'll see you soon and safe travels to anybody who's on the road. Bye. Thanks everybody. Good night.