It’s time for City Council to set in motion an amendment to the City Charter that would rectify the ridiculous way in which elections of at-large Council members are conducted.

As matters stand, a candidate for any of three at-large seats on the nine-member City Council can get a majority of the votes cast in the city’s nonpartisan primary election in September yet have to run again in the November general election against the second-place finisher or even if the September winner is unopposed.

Such a runoff requirement is a travesty and should be eliminated. To do so, a City Charter amendment is needed that would put at-large City Council contests on the same footing as mayoral elections. If a candidate for mayor gets a majority of the votes in the September primary, he or she is therewith elected. A November runoff occurs only if no candidate gets a majority in a multi-candidate primary.

Mayor Madeline Rogero is expected to announce her support for such a charter amendment any day now, and Deputy to the Mayor Bill Lyons foresees prompt consideration by City Council. Assuming Council approves it, the amendment would go on the ballot for voter approval in this November’s state election, which is the only time that state law allows for action on municipal charter amendments.

This year represents the most opportune and perhaps the only time in the next eight years for City Council to initiate the change. That’s because all nine Council members are now term-limited and therefore don’t have a vested interest in the outcome, which won’t be the case again until at least 2024.

No change is contemplated in the way in which elections for City Council’s six district seats are conducted. Candidates for each of these seats run purely in their districts in the September primary. The top two finishers in each district then run against each other citywide in the November general. This unusual—but I believe meritorious—way of electing Council members serves to make them accountable both to their districts and to the city as a whole.

A November runoff for the three at-large seats also made some sense prior to 1996.

Up until then, candidates for all three seats competed against each other in a free-for-all September primary. The top six finishers in the primary then battled it out in a November contest in which the top three finishers got elected. However, this construct created confusion among candidates and voters alike as to who was running against whom. So in 1996 Council approved and the voters adopted a construct in which the three at-large members are elected in separate contests for seats designated A,B, and C.

These contests probably would have been put on the same footing as the mayoral election at that time except for one hitch. The hitch was that only one of the six district Council seats is on the same election cycle as the at-large seats. That seat, then as now, is the 5th District and its incumbent at that time, Larry Cox, successfully pleaded with his colleagues not to subject him to running alone in a citywide election with very low visibility.

According to Lyons, Rogero is expected to recommend a solution to this problem that would place all six district seats on one election cycle and the three at-large seats on the other. On a transitional basis, whoever is elected to the 5th District when it’s next contested in 2019 would get a six-year term. So the transition would not be completed until elections to four-year terms in all districts are held in conjunction in 2025.

Rogero is also expected to make the case that holding all the district Council elections in conjunction would call more attention to them and help enhance voter turnout. Only 4,768 of the city’s 73,000 plus registered voters bothered to turn out in the city’s 2015 primary when Rogero ran unopposed and only one of the three incumbent at-large Council members on the ballot had more than a nominal challenger.

A higher voter turnout can be anticipated in 2017 when the five district seats on the ballot will all be vacated by term limits, and spirited contests are likely for succession. The last time this happened in 2009 there were 7,987 votes cast in the general election.

This is still a very low rate of voter participation in city government, and Lyons hopes that can be improved. However, he spurns the idea of holding city elections in conjunction with state elections in August and November of even-numbered years as a way to boost the turnout. Such an “artificial inflation of turnout” would “risk getting our nonpartisan elections contaminated by partisanship and drown out local issues,” Lyons contends, and I concur.

Once Rogero has made her recommendations, Vice Mayor Duane Grieve plans to convene a City Council workshop to consider them and get public input. The workshop would be open to consideration of any other ways in which city elections might be modified, including the way in which district Council members are chosen.

But Grieve, who represents the 2nd District in West Knoxville, is a strong proponent of the present method. “I think it’s extremely important for district candidates to run citywide in the general. That way, they really learn about the whole city and gain much broader perspective,” he asserts.

Joe Sullivan

Joe Sullivan is the former owner and publisher of Metro Pulse (1992-2003) as well as a longtime columnist covering local politics, education, development, business, and tennis. His new column, Perspectives, covers much of the same terrain.