ZONES: CITY WILL TAKE UP PETITIONS FOR CHANGES

The Cape Girardeau City Council will hold a special meeting at 11:15 a.m. today to discuss proposed amendments to the City Charter that would enable voters to scrap at-large city council elections in lieu of zone representation.

But City Attorney Warren Wells said there are several legal issues that need to be resolved before the zone representation proposal can be accepted.

Earlier this month, organizers of a petition drive to change to zone elections presented to the council 1,786 signatures of city voters supporting the measure.

In a letter to council members, Wells said Cape Girardeau County Clerk Rodney Miller has determined there are sufficient eligible signatures on the ballot to force the vote.

But the city attorney questioned whether the ballot measure, as it stands in the petition, is sufficient.

"The petition apparently meets the number of signatures required to have the matter placed on the ballot," Wells said. "The council should be aware that a number of issues exist which will have to be addressed if the measures are adopted."

In the council letter, Wells outlined eight potential problems with the petition. They include:

The City Charter amendment proposed in the petition contains no provision to establish the time or conditions under which the proposal would take effect or be implemented.

Information from the county clerk's office indicates that the zones established in the proposal might fail to provide equal representation under the U.S. Supreme Court's "one man-one vote" requirement.

The Supreme Court has ruled that such zones must be as equal as possible so that each zone receives the same amount of representation on the city council. Wells said the county clerk's office said the determining factor is the number of persons 18 or older who are eligible to register to vote.

But figures from the county clerk's office indicate a "wide disparity may exist in regard to the populations of the zones" set out in the proposal, Wells said.

"If this disparity exists among those who are eligible to register but who are currently not registered, then the proposal will almost certainly violate the one man-one vote rule and be invalid as far as the zone boundaries are concerned," he said.

If the proposal is adopted, the council will have to compare the zones for equality as required by the law. If the zone system provides under-representation to some segments of the population, the city could be subject to liability under civil rights laws.

Current city ward boundaries were used to set zone boundaries in the proposal. Because of the current at-large system, the county clerk established the wards "solely for the sake of convenience for the voters and clerk's office in handling the voting process," Wells said. "Because we currently have an at-large system, there is no need for these wards to be equal."

He said the requirement in the proposal that the zones be set according to the boundaries of the wards set in 1989 "may work considerable hardship on the county clerk's office in administering the election process."

The proposal doesn't include a method of dealing with annexations to the city.

The zones are established as part of the City Charter itself, which means that in order to amend the boundaries to the zones or to address any of the "equal representation" issues that might arise, the council would need to amend the charter.

Included with the petition was a map of the city showing the boundaries of the proposed zones. But Wells said he's uncertain whether the zone map accurately reflects the designation of the zones by wards as set forth in the measure.

"Any discrepancies between the designation of the zones within the body of the amendments on the one hand and the depiction of the zones on the enclosed map... will have to be resolved at some point," he said.

The proposed amendments don't state which current charter provisions should be repealed if the proposal is adopted, which makes it unclear how the amendments would "interact" with the rest of the charter, Wells said.

Wells said the matter would have to be resolved by additional charter amendments, litigation or both measures. He also said additional concerns could surface later.

"Because of the short amount of time that has been available to evaluate this proposal, we feel it should be made clear to the council that this list of concerns is not exhaustive," he said. "There may be other issues that have simply been overlooked because of the lack of time."

Lawrence Godfrey, who initiated the petition drive, asked the council to place the measure on the November election ballot which will require the council to approve the election ordinance and submit it to the county clerk by Sept. 8.