Agenda - Charter Commission - 01/08/2002 - Memorandum

Home

-12- ~ny city having a home rule charter may adopt a new or revised charter in the same manner as an original charter is adopted. (M.SoA. 410.24. ) If a new or completely revised charter is to be submitted to the voters, the ballot may be prepared in substantially the same form as previously discussed in Part III. V. SUB~ITTING SECOND CHARTER AFTER CHARTER DEFEAT There is, under the home rule provision of ~he Constitution and the home rule charter enabling act, no period of time during which the voters may not be asked to vote on a charter again after a charter is defeated at the polls. If a charter is submitted after one charter is defeated, the same procedure is used as for the earlier submission. There is some question, however, about the possibility of resubmitting the same charter without change, and it is impossible to answer this question authoritatively because there appear to no decisions, either in this state or others, involving similar problems. M.SoA. 410o10 provides that if any charter submitted to the voters is rejected, the charte~ commission "may propose others from time to time" until one is adopted. Without this language, there would be little room for hesitancy in concluding that the same charter may be submitted again at any time. That seems to be the situation with respect to the submission of a proposal for the issuance of bonds after it has once been defeated. (See A.G. Op., 1920, No. 140.) It would appear that the legislature had in mind in the language referred to simply making clear that the power of the people to adopt a charter was not .exhausted when one proposal had been defeated. As a matter of fact, it is not necessarily inconsistent with the language of the statute 'ts hold that no changes need be made in a charter before it may be submitted again. The word "others" is often used to include others of the same article and this is the interpretation that probably should be given to the word as used in the home rule enabling act. There may even be grounds for arguing that any other construction of the statute makes it an unconstitutional infringement of thelhome rule privilege granted to municipalities by the Minnesota Constitution, Article ll, Section 3. At any rate,' it apparently must be admitted that any change in the charter no matter how slight that change is, makes the charter a different one from the defeated document. If there were any objections made to the charter during the campaign before the charter election and changes in the charter can be made to meet those objections without harming the document, the charter commission may wish to considerthe inclusion of one or more of these changes in a charter to be submitted next time. VI. ABANDONING A HOME RULE CHARTER The Minnesota Constitution, Article 11, Section 4, authorizes cities having a home rule charter to repeal it and adopt a statutory form of municipal government on the same majority vote as is required by law for the adoption of a charter in the first instance. This constitutional provision, however, does not provide the machinery for repealing the charter but, rather, con- templates further legislation for that purpose.