Page 4 - Florida Sentinel 2-8-19

Feature
18 Amendments To The City Charter Will Appear On The March 5th Ballot
BY KENYA WOODARD Sentinel Feature Writer
When Tampa voters head to the polls, March 5th, they’ll do more than choose the city’s next mayor.
There will be 18 amend- ments to the city charter on the ballot.
One amendment just re- moves outdated language while another waives resi- dency requirements for de- partment heads for up to one year.
All changes were neces- sary to reflect how the city op- erates today, Lynn Hurtak, a member of the Tampa Char- ter Review Commission, told dozens of people at a gather- ing last Friday.
“A lot of things in the charter do not mirror how the city runs,” she said.
Hurtak and other mem-
bers of the commission dis- cussed the amendments and talked about their experience on the board.
The nine-member ap- pointed commission – seven were selected by city council members and two by Mayor Bob Buckhorn – met a total of 13 times and hosted two workshops between its incep- tion in July 2017 and handing off its recommendations to the City Council last May.
Members had a tough time getting information to the public about the meet- ings, a point of frustration be- tween them and the city staff, said commission member Orlando Gudes.
Hurtak concurred, say- ing the commission wasn’t “able to get the word out.”
“My personal opinion is the mayor was not supportive of the charter review,” she
LYNN HURTAK ...member of the Tampa Charter Review Commission
said. “He was not interested in promoting it.”
While the commission isn’t required to suggest changes, dozens were consid- ered including a proposal to shake up the strong mayor- city council makeup of local government. But that idea failed to capture a six-major- ity vote from the commission.
Other proposals were
abandoned once it was deter- mined they would conflict with state law, Hurtak said.
The changes that did make the final cut and were approved by the City Council include:
•amendments that re- move references to gender
•another that requires all proposed ordinances be posted on the city’s website within seven days before adoption,
And, one that prohibits discrimination based on sex- ual orientation, gender iden- tification, or ethnicity.
While commissioners went back and forth on sev- eral of the amendments, the residency requirement was heavily favored.
“We thought that was im- portant,” Hurtak said. “If you are the head of sanita- tion, you need to know what’s
going on, on your street.” Hurtak said she wanted an amendment more strin- gent than the one that’s on
the ballot.
To ensure there isn’t an-
other 40-year wait for the next charter review, there’s an amendment establishing a commission every ten years beginning in 2027.
It includes a provision that the commission is bud- geted so that future commis- sions “don’t have to go through what we went through,” Hurtak said.
More About City
Charter Amendments
Eighteen amendments to the city’s charter will appear on the ballot in next month’s election. To read the amend- ments, visit https://www.- votehillsborough.org/About- Voting/Whats-on-the-ballot.
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