Council discusses Charter Ordinance

Despite interest amongst council members, changing the city’s Charter Ordinance might not bring about the changes some councilmen want to make.

Last night, the Green River City Council discussed language used in its Charter Ordinance, an ordinance that creates the city administrator position and outlines the powers and responsibilities the council, mayor and city administrator have.

The discussion, according to Councilman Gary Killpack, is roughly eight months in the making. Killpack said he wanted to have the discussion about the ordinance since before the election, saying he believes some portions should be modified. Any modification to the ordinance would require five of the seven council members to vote in favor of the change.

While the changes discussed would limit the mayor’s oversight for the city administrator, much of the discussion centered around the goal of preventing the mayor from having too much influence on the city. Currently, how the city government is set up, the city council functions as a body that sets budgets, drafts laws and creates priorities, with the city administrator tasked with carrying out the council’s desires and the mayor overseeing the city administrator to oversee those tasks are carried out.

Killpack believes the council should oversee the city administrator, not the mayor as he believes that supervision would allow a mayor to control what the city administrator does, regardless of the council’s wishes. Killpack also seeks to understand where his bounds end in regard to what’s expected of the city council in the Charter Ordinance.

However, Galen West, the city’s attorney, said much of what’s in the Charter Ordinance represents the managerial philosophy of the council that drafted and passed the ordinance.

He speculates that the council managing the administrator would prove to be difficult for the group, which is why the mayor was chosen to oversee the city administrator. Another reason why the mayor was chosen to oversee the city administrator is due to the fact that the mayor is often at City Hall more frequently than council members.

However, some doubt remains about if any change to the Charter Ordinance would prevent someone from acting outside of its bounds.

“The fact that somebody abused that doesn’t mean the Charter Ordinance should be changed,” Mayor Pete Rust said.

Rust believes someone wanting to act outside of what the law dictates will do that, regardless of what the ordinance states. He said law changes intended to punish those who act outside the law often punish everyone else because the original people targeted by a law don’t care about it anyway.

West agrees with this opinion, saying the Charter Ordinance hasn’t prevented previous council members from acting outside of their roles.

Three council members, Ted Barney, Allan Wilson and Killpack, agreed to look at the ordinance’s language and propose possible changes at a future date.