Local government expert discusses charter government advantages

Montana State University Local Government Director Dan Clark gave a presentation on the differences between charter governments and general governments at Havre City Hall Thursday evening and answered questions from members of the audience.

The City of Havre has put a proposal on the ballot to change Havre to a charter form of government.

Clark said he wanted to make sure people know what they would be voting for in November and he wanted people to engage and ask questions.

"My intent is to make sure that you feel comfortable with understanding what it means to have self-governing powers," Clark said.

He said the fundamental difference between the current form of government the City of Havre uses and a charter government is that Havre would move from having general powers to self-governing powers.

General powers, he said, means that a municipality is allowed to do only what the law and the Montana State Legislature explicitly says they are allowed to do.

Self-governing powers means the city can do anything that is not explicitly prohibited by law or the Legislature.

In practice, he said, self-governing powers means that instead of going to Helena and asking the Legislature to, in essence, create the authority for a municipality to do something they feel they need to do, which might take multiple sessions or not happen at all, they can just do it as long as the Legislature or existing law doesn't prohibit it.

Clark said, back in 1889, when Montana became a state and its original Constitution was created, local government was legally considered a creation of the Legislature.

He said, according to the widely recognized legal principal called The Dillon Rule, municipalities were considered a creature of the state given authority only by the Legislature, a system that would come to be called general government powers.

However, he said, by 1972 during the constitutional convention, there was a push by municipalities that wanted more autonomy.

This convention not only expanded general government powers, but established the possibility that municipalities could create their own charters, which he said are effectively constitutions for a city or county.

Clark said he personally sees a bit of a disconnect in how state governments deal with the federal government and how they deal with local governments.

"I find it ironic that our state Legislatures are always screaming and yelling about states' rights, you know 'Hey government stay off, leave us alone,'" he said. "But when it comes to applying that same principal to local government, oh no, they want to be all up in your business."

At the beginning of the presentation Clark said he would attempt to keep his opinions to himself and not convince people what is the right thing to do.

"I won't try to sway you one way or the other," he said. "Notice how I said try."

However, as the conversation proceeded and questions were asked, Clark said he couldn't really pretend he was neutral and said he's very much in favor of a charter government, which he said would allow the city far greater flexibility in how it addresses the needs of the people who live there.

Audience member Paul Verity raised a concern that a charter government could be a power grab for local government, but Clark said there are institutions in place to prevent local governments from going too far.

He said the city still wouldn't have the power to do things already prohibited by the legislature and the law and adopting a charter wouldn't fundamentally change the process for creating things like mill levies and policy changes.

He said everything that would now require the approval of the city council, or the voters, would still require that approval, and hearings would still be needed as they are now.

Clark said there is always the possibility that if the city did to something really whacky, the state Legislature could prohibit it in their next session, so there are safe guards, legal and legislative that would in theory prevent local governments to pushing the envelope too severely.

As an example, he cited Billings, which, at one point, attempted to repealed all the code that related to fire protection without replacing it with anything, but the fire-fighters union sued their government and the supreme court effectively ruled that they cannot simply throw all of that code out, that Billings could draw up its own rules regarding fire-protection, but they had an obligation to meet a minimum standard of protection.

Clark said there are plenty of things the city government cannot legally interfere with, such as the elections process, collective bargaining and the operation of public schools, none of which would change if they moved to a charter government.

However, he said, a charter provides the city with much greater flexibility in how it deals with certain issues.

"If there is something that is going on in the City of Havre and you say, 'Look we want to address this, we want to regulate this, there is something that we feel as a community is important to us,' but there's nothing in the law that says, 'Thou shalt be able to do this,' these self-governing powers will give you the ability to say, 'It's not prohibited but it's something that we need,'" he said.

Verity asked about the creation of a municipal internet service for Havre, which he said he's been interested in for some time.

Clark said this would technically become possible under a self-governing powers because there is no law that says municipalities have that right, but there is no law that says they don't.

He said restrictions can be written into a charter, but he said that can often hamstring local governments such as in the case of Billings, which put a cap on the number of mills that they could have when they wrote their charter.

Clark said that's something they are definitely regretting decades later, although that may be a moot point with regards to the upcoming election as the language for the charter has been locked in.

Havre City Council Ordinance Committee Member Lindsey Ratliff, who originally invited Clark to give this presentation, and others said the current charter is identical to the current government with the exception of switching out general government powers for self-governing powers.

"There's nothing new, there's no curveballs," she said.

Verity asked what the city is looking to do that would require self-governing powers that they couldn't do with general government powers.

Havre Mayor Tim Solomon and Ratliff both said there isn't actually anything in particular that they have in the works, but rather that adopting a charter is a future-forward solution to problems yet unseen.

Ratliff said it's a way to free up the city government to address issues in the community without being unnecessarily impeded.

"With self-governing powers, we can do a lot more," she said.

The City of Havre has attempted to create a charter government and put the matter on the ballot many times before, but until now that shift to charter government had been accompanied with a shift to a city manager model of government as well, which would require the hiring of a city manager.

An audience member who didn't identify themselves said he thinks last time the city was attempting to change too much at one time and things were too complicated and it scared people into not voting for it.

Audience member David Brewer said the big reason he thinks previous attempts to approve a charter government have failed was simply because the salary for a city manager was prohibitively high in the eyes of voters.

He said he wishes the city had stuck with just the charter in the previous attempt, which he thinks would have resulted in it passing.

"I think if we'd have just gone with self-governing powers, we'd be under that right now, we'd be flourishing," he said.