Dual charter amendments could reshape how Columbus City Council members are elected

Members of Columbus DSA, one of the many, varied organizations that have come together this year to help progress the Our City, Our Say ballot initiative, said the current system of electing City Council members has long proven to be ineffective.

“We’ve seen what’s happened with this current at-large system,” said Scott Winzig, who joined Bryce Sampson and chapter chair Kyle Miller for a mid-August interview. “We’ve had, what, 100-odd years of this? And where’s the housing? Where’s the transit? Where’s the public education? Where’s the safety? Where are all these things … that we would like from our city?”

Under Columbus’ current hybrid district system, instituted in 2023, City Council members must live in the districts they serve, but the entire city votes in all nine district council races. If passed by voters, the Our City, Our Say charter amendment would replace this with a system in which council members are elected by the residents of the ward they live in and are seeking to represent. Proponents of this initiative, known as “the simple fix,” argue that a true ward system increases accountability while also opening up avenues for a more diverse slate of grassroots candidates who might not have the financial means to field a citywide campaign.

“I know they have the money, but I still say the currency is with the people,” Adrienne Hood said amid her unsuccessful bid to unseat council member Emmanuel Remy in 2023. 

The Our City, Our Say (OCOS) campaign has its roots in Hood’s run but also in decades of earlier attempted electoral reforms and especially last year’s highly contested District 7 electoral showdown between Jesse Vogel and Tiara Ross, which saw Vogel win 63 percent of the district vote but lose the citywide count by just 1,585 votes.

“And I think having a candidate win the majority of votes in his district, both in the primary and the election, and still lose, that really made it clear … for a lot of Columbus residents the issues that exist with the system that City Council put into place,” Sharon Kim, a lead organizer with OCOS coalition member Asian American Midwest Progressives, said in April.

While working to obtain signatures to get their charter amendment on the Nov. 3 ballot – a process that kicked off in April and ended in July with more than 23,000 signatures submitted – members of the Our City, Our Say coalition also began meeting regularly with City Council, first casually and then eventually in a more formalized manner, with discussions encompassing everything from the electoral process to campaign finance reform and the redrawing of current district maps. 

“These are folks that advocate on any number of issues, and some of the organizations that make up that coalition are people that I talk to on a regular basis,” council member Rob Dorans said in mid-August from the patio of a Clintonville coffee shop. “And some of the discussions started from, ‘Hey, we know each other from this other stuff, what are you thinking?’ And it grew from there to where … we decided to sit down at the table and see if there was any common ground.”

For council, previous negotiations with the Columbus Safety Collective, which led to a compromise on non-emergency police response being enshrined in the city charter this year, helped to form a framework for how it approached discussions with Our City, Our Say.

“I think that was a hell of a learning example internally for council to say, we have folks on the outside with a clear, impassioned interest in a piece of public policy,” Dorans said. “And I think that actual exercise [with the Safety Collective] created some muscle memory within council to say that these don’t have to be oppositional discussions.”

Of course, Our City, Our Say is more sprawling in comparison, with a steering committee of 35 to 40 people working to harness the perspectives of a diverse coalition whose membership includes, among others, former city council candidates Adrienne Hood and Jesse Vogel, Indivisible Central Ohio, the Columbus Education Association, Asian American Midwest Progressives, Columbus DSA, Transit Columbus, and Strong Towns Columbus.

“And so, before we even said, yes, we’re willing to engage in conversation, we had to have a big conversation with our folks,” said Our City, Our Say spokesperson Colleen O’Connell. 

For council, the biggest early hurdle involved developing an understanding that the people seated across the table could fluctuate from week to week and did not speak for everyone in the coalition. “So, I think we acknowledged on the front end that this had the potential to be a bit different, because it was a grassroots coalition, and that’s lots of different people, lots of different views, lots of different processes,” Dorans said.

In early August, these negotiations culminated in the framework of a deal that would have created a single ballot initiative featuring nine true ward seats and four at-large seats – a compromise that was ultimately rejected by Our City, Our Say, with some members of the coalition speaking to the idea that at-large seats were not part of the “simple fix” proposal the coalition pitched to the public and for which it gathered more than 23,000 signatures.

“I think we collected like 8,000 of those signatures, and there’s a weight you carry with that,” said Kyle Miller of Columbus DSA. “We had all these conversations, and you want to a, take in people’s feelings around this, and make sure we’re all on the same page”

Plus, Winzig said, “[council] adding at-large seats as a counter, it’s just them retaining power” while reducing the influence of the citizenry. 

“We saw what happened with McCoy Park, for example, where you had residents go to council and say, ‘We don’t want this,’ but under the current system where everyone is at-large, there’s no accountability,” Winzig said of the council decision to hand over the Southwest Side park to private investors headlined by the Haslam Sports Group with plans to develop a training facility for a new NWSL expansion team on the site. “Every at-large seat just creates more barriers to accountability.”

Similar voices of opposition surfaced alongside those in favor of preserving either the current system or at least maintaining some number of at-large seats during a council hearing on Monday. Over the course of the nearly three hour session, labor leaders, residents, and members of Our City, Our Say provided feedback related to a potential council-led charter amendment that could appear on the ballot alongside the already-approved OCOS initiative. 

“There’s just no way my district gets effective representation from an at-large City Council member who represents almost one million people,” said Driving Park resident Danielle Dillard. “It’s time for us to vote for who cares about our district, who lives in our district, who’s familiar with our district, who didn’t just move to our district.”

Will Harmon, president of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees Local 1632, joined other local labor leaders in advocating for a council-drafted charter amendment that would include some number of at-large seats, arguing in his submitted testimony that “a city government only works when it can make decisions for the whole city and a council with no at-large representation loses that ability.” 

At points in the meeting, those supportive of the Our City, Our Say initiative expressed frustration at the secretive nature of the talks between the city and the coalition, as well as the fact that speakers in favor of council’s potential charter amendment maintaining some number of at-large seats appeared to have come into the hearing with a more intimate knowledge of the plan. “I don’t, in theory, have a problem with an actual hybrid system where we have nine real district seats and up to four at-large seats,” Katy Shanahan said. “I do have a problem with that proposal being talked about behind closed doors except for the 15 or so people who got notice of it ahead of tonight’s announcement … because they had the information necessary to create testimony for it.”

Dorans said on Wednesday that council had spent “many, many hours” talking with members of Our City, Our Say, but that similar conversations had also taken place with other constituencies, including the labor leaders who spoke at Monday’s hearing. “And I think we were very clear with the folks from the Our City, Our Say coalition that when we were having these discussions there were other voices we wanted to make sure were engaged and were involved in this, and Monday we heard very clearly from some of those voices about what they desired and what they think is a good system,” he continued. “Labor leaders would call me up and say, ‘Hey, how are these discussions going? What are you guys talking about?’ And I don’t think it’s a problem for me to tell them, ‘Here’s generally the framework we’re talking about, and here’s the balance we’re seeing [between ward and at-large seats],’ because these folks have a very clear interest in what that system would mean for them and their members.”

Dorans also said that council had not yet finalized the language for its potential amendment but that his early outline of the proposal, which he said needs to be completed ahead of the council meeting on Monday, Aug. 24 in order to meet the Sept. 4 deadline to make the November ballot, featured nine true wards and four at-large seats. 

“What we’re trying to do is design potentially a second ballot initiative that is additive,” Dorans said. “And I view it as additive, because again, [the Our City, Our Say] ballot initiative is silent as to whether or not at-large seats exist. … And I understand that from a conceptual standpoint folks might say, ‘We proposed nine districts and not this other thing.’ But I think there would be a clear difference in us coming in and saying, ‘Actually, we see a seven-four split between wards and at-large,’ which I think is very directly on its face a conflict. And look, there are going to be lots of different options about this within that coalition and outside that coalition, but for me, anyways, it’s about what we can do to complement one another rather than being directly oppositional.”

O’Connell of Our City, Our Say conceded that a scenario exists where if the looming City Council charter amendment proposes nine wards and four at-large seats, and if voters approve of the initiative, future council elections could operate within the framework of the compromise previously rejected by the grassroots coalition.

“There’s a reality where we could very well end up with the agreement that we turned down,” said O’Connell, who added that the coalition had already voted not to “spend time opposing” a council amendment if it proposed a nine-four split between wards and at-large seats because that framework had previously been discussed by the parties. “However, people deserve to have conversations about the two different proposals. … I would say since we are such an organizing-oriented group, there’s a lot of value in having conversations with people, making sure people have a place to be heard, and to know there’s a place for them to work with their neighbors to make their government more responsive to them. And at the end of the day, if what council sends is nine-four, and even if that wins, we still have a big, activated base of folks that are ready to fight for more reforms, to push for those, and to get things done.”

Correction: Indivisible Central Ohio was initially named as Indivisible Ohio upon publication. Matter News regrets the error.