Commission gets report on charter

Latane Speer and the other 10 members of the City Charter Review Committee are happy campers today and the city is a step closer to having an updated city charter.

The city commission approved the charter review committee’s final report at its Tuesday night meeting.

“I want to applaud the work of the committee,” said Mayor Joe T. Parker. “They held a lot of meetings and completed a lot of hard work to get this report to us in a timely fashion.”

Speer told the commissioners that the current charter contains 13 articles and about 138 sections.

“Many sections were deleted because they were obsolete, counter to state law; some had minor changes; and some were left alone,” she said.

Speer pointed out one of the suggestions is to change the term “city commission” to “city council”.

“This is not a drastic change,” Speer said. “Kilgore has been operating under a council manager form of government anyway.”

Speer said the committee was pleased with its recommendations and “we tried to make the city charter better.”

Don Edmonds, the charter consultant hired to oversee the process, complimented the committee as being “the most congenial and productive (charter) committee I’ve worked with.”

He said the 11-member committee was a “fine group of citizens who asked tough questions and did their homework.”

Edmonds said it was a “challenge to modernize the (45-year old) Kilgore charter ... It wasn’t an easy fix and will need an extensive ballot.”

City Manager Jeff Howell recommended the commission conduct several workshops to go through the report.

They need to look at the changes and the reasons why the committee suggested what it did,” he said. “If they have no changes to the proposed document when we’ll fly with it.”

Once the commissioners decide which proposals to pursue and to pass on to the voters, then the matter will return to the commission for a final vote (on proposed charter changes).

Commissioners have the right to put all or part – or none – of the proposed changes to the voters. Assuming all or part of the recommendations are approved, they will be on a May ballot.

Between now and then, the proposals have to be translated into Spanish. Also copies of the proposed changes will be mailed to all voters in the city. During this time City Attorney Rob Schleier will convert the proposals into ballot form and seek ballot approval from the Justice Department.

Howell said the city will conduct a massive campaign to educate the voters on the proposed changes.

“The ballot will be voluminous and there will be some need for understanding on what you are voting on,” Howell said. “We will work with the Kilgore News Herald on explaining the propositions as clearly as possible, and giving every citizen a chance to learn about the proposed changes.”

Work on the revisions began in September and both Howell and Edmonds hoped to have the report to the commission no later that the first of December in order to be able to meet the required deadline for the May election.

Kilgore citizens appointed to the revision committee include Speer, Neil Barr, Louise Broussard, Bob Bustin, Tom Conner, George Faber, Charlie Gauntt, Dody Keiser, Harvey McClendon, Brent Rice and Bill Woodall.