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Charter Options
The City of Ashland Charter does not specify a process for updating the Charter. Based
on research of numerous other cities and counties
1) Hire an outside consultant to review the existing Charter and identify areas that need to
be updated: For example:
?
identify provisions that are no longer constitutional, that are in conflict with state
legislature,
?
indicate areas that are policy driven decisions vs. legal
?
What constitutes a quorum? If a re-call takes away four councilors are we below a
quorum? It depends on how the charter is written
2) Appoint a Charter Review Committe
examples of review committee make-up 3 existing councilors, 2 previous
councilors for historic purposes, 2 citizen at large, city staff
3) Essential to have a charter update before code update
4) Have staff draft a new charter to bring to council
5) Determine if we stay with a mayor-council form of government or move to council-
manager (only the smallest cities that cannot afford a full-time manager still have mayor-
council form of government. Two large cities in Oregon still have it: Beaverton full time
manager/mayor and Portland I don't know why.)
Best to identify the issues and set a time-line to address each issue