By Nick Vlahos, David Schecter and Linn Davis
Introduction
In the next five years, at least a dozen cities in the United States will review their city charters to determine if and how their local government processes might change. In an era of increasing polarization and cynicism, charter revision offers an opportunity to revitalize local democracy by improving and altering government systems and increasing the public’s role in decision making.
Participating in the review of a city charter is a unique opportunity. City charters are like local constitutions. They establish the institutional structures, legal powers, duties and responsibilities of local government. Constitutions do not change very often, and it is even rarer for the public to have a significant role in determining what they contain. By contrast, the charter review process – and the public referendum that typically results – provide unique opportunities for the public to inclusively learn, deliberate, and prescribe new ways of doing local democracy.
This article addresses two common problems with charter review processes. First, these processes are vulnerable to undue political influence – both in the selection of charter commissions and in the setting of the commission’s agenda. Second, these processes are often inaccessible to everyday residents and unrepresentative of a city’s many diversities. And the traditional engagement methods used often do not provide sufficient opportunities for public learning, listening, discussion, connection, and collective impact. We propose addressing these problems with representative deliberative processes, which put people from all walks of life in place of a hand-selected commission. In addition, the article proposes several ways to incorporate lottery-selected deliberative processes into charter language, as ongoing improvements in local democracy.
Civic Engagement and Charter Review Processes
There is a significant record of public engagement linked to the structural reform of city governance. The original Model City Charter (1898) created by the National Civic League was a guide for municipalities to forge a local social contract between citizens and representatives, such that the institutions and relationships that would be embodied in the charter would reflect public preferences and political needs of the time. The evolution and modernization of city governance has coincided with the need to update government documents to address social pressures, new legislative requirements, and new challenges. By the time of the second model charter in 1915, citizen participation was aligned with new and expansive voting procedures. Suffrage and the base of popular voting of elected representatives was being broadened to new sections of the population, and citizen decision-making was becoming commonplace through initiatives, referenda, recall, and citizen advisory committees.
The review and drafting of content in city charters continues to have an element of public engagement depending on the municipality, but this is not a formal requirement. The most recent Model City Charter outlines the foundations for healthy civic infrastructure that will treat public engagement as integral to governance.
Once a charter commission is established, it will work on potentially altering a form of government (ex. strong mayor versus city manager) to be better aligned with the preferences of citizens, or seek to redistribute powers among elected officials, appointed officials and governing bodies as well as between city officials and citizens. A commission carries out research and analysis of the current charter and charters of adjacent municipalities. Based on existing and previous example charter review processes, there are three aspects of a charter review process:
Charter revision has an initiation process:
- Legislation (state or municipality) requires the review of the charter between a set period of time
- A legislative body can convene a charter review process
- Citizens can trigger a charter review process through an initiative
Charter revision has multiple possible forms:
- Citizens can form a charter review commission on their own
- A mayor or council can select the commissioners
- Some type of democracy innovation like a citizens’ assembly can be used
Charter revision has a ratification process:
- The commission’s proposed changes go directly to referendum (often requires supermajority support of the commission)
- The commission submits its proposed changes to a local council; any supported changes, with modifications, then go to referendum
- The commission submits its proposed changes to a local council; any supported changes become part of a special act, which goes to the state legislature, then to a referendum
Generally, a charter commission is authorized by law, often with members appointed by the mayor or council members, or sometimes via election. A chair is then selected to lead meetings and facilitate the work of the commission. Some type of funding schedule might be allocated. Then a commission will often carry out research, and a public education and outreach campaign. Public engagement generally takes the form of public hearings involving expert testimony, followed by a traditional town hall public comment period to the commission. Some charter commissions might host place-based community meetings to draw in community partners and hear from diverse voices. Most commissions are 12 to 18 months long, but it is not uncommon for them to last more than two years due to various internal challenges like attrition. Following the drafting of a revised charter, there may be further community feedback on the commission’s proposed changes. Then, the proposed changes may go either 1) directly to the public via referendum, 2) to city council (or a council committee) for approval or modification, then to referendum, or 3) to council, then to the state legislature, then to referendum.
Charter review processes often use traditional engagement practices that the public tend to dislike, such as public hearings, and sometimes there is no public engagement at all. Public engagement is very limited if the only opportunity to be heard is at a microphone for a couple of minutes. Also, where there are limited opportunities for meaningful deliberation, the people that tend to show up (in small numbers) are often unrepresentative of the community.
As a result, the public might feel that there was insufficient participation and awareness of the process, and this might lead to the draft not being approved by voters. This means that it is important to hear from parts of the community that are not often engaged or included in official government consultative processes. At the same time, charter commissions might appear as being too politically (or personally) aligned with elected leaders because of how commissioners are selected, which impacts the legitimacy of an authentic, independent process.
Better forms of community collaboration involve active listening to nuanced perspectives. There should be multichannel in-person and digital opportunities to learn, discuss and make decisions about charter contents. Communities should utilize the strengths of small group facilitated work, in conjunction with crowdsourced online ideas and discussion.
Below, we argue that charter review commissions should begin to use representative deliberative processes to guide the commission process, and also as a regular facet of governance within a charter. These processes are unique for three reasons. First, participants from all walks of life are selected by democratic lottery. A letter is sent to thousands of randomly selected residential addresses, then residents respond, and respondents are selected during a public lottery event, using open-source software that randomly selects a group that is representative of the city’s demographics. Second, the group works through principles of deliberative democracy. Deliberative processes aim to create conditions where in-depth collaboration and agreement are possible, while appreciating viewpoint diversity and never forcing consensus. Third, these processes are adaptable across contexts. Representative deliberative processes have been used hundreds of times at the local, subnational, intra-regional, international, and global level (OECD, 2023). While they have a very consistent set of phases across all of them, they involve various types of contextual experimentation with adjacent forms of participation and political collaboration in addition to the work being done within an assembly.
Representative deliberative processes are often used to address complex policy issues because their structured deliberative processes focus on finding common ground, unconstrained by political and partisan deadlocks. Moreover, longitudinal research suggests that these deliberative processes have several benefits. They enhance political knowledge and mutual understanding, they boost the confidence of participants, they shift political and policy attitudes in a positive direction, and they create behavioral changes by motivating people to be more civically engaged. Therefore, these processes often alter the internal efficacy of participants. Evidence also points to significant impacts beyond participants themselves; in one notable study, members of the public who simply knew that a lottery-selected body had been convened reported increased political efficacy. Knowing that “people like me” are involved in important policy questions has the potential for broad impacts on our sense of ownership over public decisions and on our political culture at large.
Innovative Public Engagement During Charter Review
Below we briefly outline stages of a deliberative charter review, acknowledging that such a process might need to involve customization depending on the context.
Forming the Commission and Setting the Agenda
Charter review commissions should be selected by democratic lottery so that the commission is representative of the community, and so that the selection is clearly free from political influence. At this stage, the commission needs to do three things: 1) determine a process for a rotating or elected chair; 2) make the phases of the commission public, i.e. agenda-setting, charter education and research, crowdsourcing and proposal deliberation, and drafting and revising the charter, supporting a possible referendum, and evaluating the charter review process; and 3) crowdsource public ideas about the charter review’s agenda (what parts of the charter to review, and what parts to add, if any).
The charter commission, in conjunction with the local government, should advertise an open call for ideas about aspects of the charter that need to be revisited, and the types of engagement that the commission could and should use to supplement its own published process. This can be done digitally, either through an online portal or commission email.
Charter Education and Research
An integral component of any deliberative process is the combination of 1) learning about a topic from people with lived experience and technical expertise, with 2) extended periods of time to exchange ideas, criticisms, lessons and the pros and cons of what was presented. In this phase, a balanced set of legal, political, and bureaucratic experts, as well as community organizations, would provide materials and presentations for the commission – and the public – to learn from.
Depending on available resources, these presentations would be given in-person at a public forum, but where available, short videos might be posted online along with downloadable reading content. For the engagement portion of these meetings, the agenda would include moving from a larger plenary to having charter commissioners sit at roundtables to hear and take note of resident thoughts and concerns and have a mutual dialogue on the specific issues or content under consideration.
Gathering Ideas
In this phase, the main purpose is to gather ideas and proposals around the different sections of the charter that need to be adjusted. In traditional processes, an appointed commission holds public meetings and hears testimony from public officials, staff, representatives of community organizations and members of the public. Typically, this process does not provide opportunities for the public to submit more thorough proposals or to have these proposals be discussed in-depth by the commission. In contrast, we envision a process where public ideation is not an afterthought – that starts with a call for the public to submit proposals online and that encourages individuals, experts, and local groups to make recommendations.
In addition, the conversation around these proposals would need to not be limited to the commissioners. Digital technology like Polis or Decidim, are open source and allow for the public to create ideas, rate the ideas of others, and engage in discussion around and/or propose amendments to these ideas. This would produce a diverse, prioritized set of ideas for the commission to consider.
Deliberation and Drafting Revisions to the Charter
Like most municipal boards and commissions, charter review bodies typically rely on formal, rule-based procedures and loose, un-designed discussions. These traditional processes can be at times inflexible and cumbersome and at others an unproductive free-for-all. They are particularly ill-suited to the charter review context, one featuring an unusually large quantity of background information, proposed solutions, complexity, and contention. Deliberative assemblies are a different kind of public process – meticulously designed but maximally responsive, foundationally collaborative but welcoming of generative disagreement, and carefully balanced between the creativity and rights of the individual and the need for effective group work and decision making. They incorporate multiple feedback loops using multiple methods, targeting multiple audiences, at multiple points during the process. They prioritize participant empowerment – in regard to both content and process – and they are proven to find common-ground solutions in even the stickiest political contexts. In short, they are readymade for the difficult work of a charter review commission.
Detailing the deliberation, drafting, feedback, revision, and voting elements of a lottery-based charter review commission is beyond the scope of this article – particular elements are highly context-dependent, and deliberative process design is a specialized competency. That said, for an introduction to the basics of deliberative design, see Chapter 5 of the United Nations Democracy Fund’s primer on citizens’ assemblies.
Generally, all assembly recommendations require supermajority support to move on – deliberative bodies are built to help participants find new areas of “rough consensus,” not to push forward just-enough majoritarian proposals. Moreover, each draft change would not be proposed in isolation but would include a clear, concise rationale – on both a values and feasibility basis.
Supporting the Charter Referendum
Charter processes are not only citizen engagement exercises. They are complex political activities that involve different political actors from different levels of government. Not all newly revised charters are implemented for different political reasons. Where a referendum is used to determine if the proposed changes to the charter are enacted, there are ways to strengthen this process. While the initiative and referendum process is among the most popular democratic institutions in the states and localities where they are used, they suffer from a few key problems, including: voters are often subjected to substantial mis- and disinformation, measures are often complex and confusing – with hard-to-determine long-term consequences – and high levels of campaign spending may flood into one or both campaigns.
One mitigation to these issues would be to adapt the Citizens’ Initiative Review (CIR) process that has been used in Oregon to inform voters about ballot initiatives and referendums. In the CIR, a lottery-selected citizen body questions the pro and con campaigns, hears from third-party experts, and conducts independent research to advise voters on the most important background information about the measure, as well as on the best reasons to vote for and against it. The resulting “citizens’ statement” is printed in the official voters’ pamphlet, which is mailed to all voters. Extensive research on the CIR has shown its statements to be accurate, readable, and more useful to and trusted by voters than most common sources of voter information.
In the case of the deliberative charter commission proposed here, a separate CIR would not be necessary – after all, a thorough deliberative process created the proposed changes in the first place. However, part of the commission’s work should include writing a voters’ pamphlet statement, which details an overview of the participatory process and the proposed charter changes and rationales.
Evaluating the Charter Changes, and the Review Process
Regardless of whether charter changes are approved in a referendum, there should be some evaluation and learning from the process. Overlapping ways to evaluate the process include: a brief public survey, a final report by the commission, and an independent public evaluation (including interviews with commissioners).
If the charter changes are approved, there is a need for periodic audits. Some of the questions that should be asked are: To what extent was the initial draft faithfully implemented? To what extent did the changes have the intended effects stated in the rationale for the change proposal? What other effects (positive and negative) did the charter changes have? What important lessons can be learned?
Joe Matthews and Wayne Liebman (private correspondence) propose that a charter audit should be done by an assembly that includes some members of the commission that wrote the charter and some drawn by lot from the public. Their evaluation and recommendations should feed directly into agenda-setting for the next charter review process. This would allow for identification of aspects that impeded and helped support the commission’s efforts to do its job effectively.
How to Innovate Engagement within a Charter
In this section, we briefly turn our attention to advocating for innovative forms of citizen engagement within charters. The current Model City Charter suggests that charter commissions should incorporate citizen participation in Article 7. Section 7.01 proposes that a city should treat public engagement as integral to governance and include multi-channel in-person and digital opportunities for engagement. Moreover, S. 7.03 proposes that the principles of public engagement should include equity, accountability, transparency, accessibility, collaboration and evaluation. Article 7 is a step in the right direction for a community to enshrine engagement in its local constitution, and it deliberately leaves the recommendation broad to allow for diverse iterations and pilots and practices to be utilized.
While we should be broad enough to allow for future innovation, we should also identify specific ways to institutionalize participation. Here are some possibilities:
- Reforming existing civic infrastructure. This includes how official public meetings operate, i.e. how public engagement takes place within city council meetings and study sessions, as well as boards and commissions.
- Deliberative Citizen Advisory Bodies. CABs are one of the oldest forms of public participation within local government, but they have not been innovated over time. For example, Margert Stout argues that CABs are ripe for deliberative innovation and should be switched to civic lottery advisory bodies.
- Deliberative Public Comment sessions. The standard microphone interaction before a dais has not changed in a hundred years. One possibility is to infuse public comment periods with a deliberative approach and replace or supplement open, voluntary selection with some form of civic lottery and small-group deliberation (as implemented in Boulder, Colorado).
- Ad Hoc Councilor-Convened Panels. A mechanism by which the city council could initiate citizens’ assemblies on topics of their choice, subject to certain conditions. These assemblies could either: a) investigate and/or provide recommendations on a policy concept the council is considering, or b) investigate and/or provide recommendations on an executive function within the executive branch (mayor’s office or city department).
- Creating new institutional mechanisms that house citizen decision-making processes. Not only should existing civic infrastructure be updated, but new processes should be created with public bodies that set agendas, convene public meetings, and propose policies for legislative consideration and implementation.
- Policy Advisory Commission. A standing citizens’ assembly to serve as advisors to and collaborators with the city council on policy making (similar to the Toronto Planning Review Panel’s relationship for several years with the city’s planning department). The Policy Advisory Commission would assist the council with policy ideation, sourcing ideas from the public, staff, and others to help council members identify top policy priorities on a continuous basis.
- Civic Participation Commission. A standing citizens’ assembly to oversee citywide standards and procedures for public engagement across all city departments. This role could either be advisory to the council or have final decision-making power over such standards. As part of this role, the commission would also act as the steering committee for any participatory budgeting processes.
- Creating the protocols for forthcoming charter review processes (for example, in Article IX of the Model City Charter) using language that sets up future citizen opportunities, resources and support for next iterations.
Conclusion
Compared to the usual charter revision process, the process we propose would have several benefits. A lottery-selected commission would be less vulnerable to political influence than an appointed or elected commission. It would also be more representative of the public and more diverse. Lottery selection would give all members of the public periodic chance of serving. There would also be much more meaningful participation from the public across the entire process. This would help create the groundwork for charter changes that actively involved the public and would help create community support for an eventual referendum. In terms of the content of charters, the options we propose could make a big difference in incorporating public participation as an ongoing part of democracy, in ways that are representative, deliberative and influential.
Conversations around democratizing charter review processes – and charters themselves – through the use of representative deliberative innovations are fairly recent. We see this article as part of a collaborative and ongoing conversation that welcomes further iterations, as well as research around their application across diverse charter review contexts.
Nick Vlahos is Deputy Director of the Center for Democracy Innovation at the National Civic League.
David Schecter is a Co-lead of the Democracy R&D network, a network of organizations and individuals working with deliberative democracy in 57 countries.
Linn Davis co-leads Healthy Democracy’s program development and process design.
Acknowledgements
We would like to thank Lyn Carson, Wayne Liebman, Joe Matthews, Stephen Erickson, Wendy Willis, and Mike McGrath for their helpful comments on a previous draft of this article.
