The struggle within
It's been a week since Salisbury City Council approved a City Charter amendment to place the city attorney under the supervision of the council rather than under the mayor. That vote stemmed from a June incident when Mayor Jim Ireton advised the city attorney not to attend a closed session of City Council because insufficient public notice was given beforehand. The charter amendment was approved by a group of three Council members who have become the new majority in a run of 3-2 votes; interestingly enough all three hail from the same Camden neighborhood.
In response, Council member Laura Mitchell, one of the two who voted against the change, has initiated a petition drive which would take this newly-enacted power of City Council and subject it to a referendum next year. On Facebook she stated that, "I take issue with the manner in which this resolution was handled, the pretense under which it was advanced, and most importantly the substance of the amendment." While Mitchell says she has "overwhelming support," she faces an uphill struggle as the threshold for bringing the issue to the ballot requires a larger percentage of voters to sign than the number who bothered to show up and cast their ballots earlier this year.
But the way I look at the issue is if you consider the Mayor's job is to be the executive branch and the Council's to be the legislative, then it seems like an abuse of power by Council to have adopted this charter change. If you think of this on a national level, while it's the Senate's job to advise and provide consent to the President on the selection of Cabinet members, judges, and others within the purview of the Executive branch, they can't remove the person without just cause through an impeachment process. This Salisbury City Council would presume to be such a judge and jury.
And there is a bit of discussion going around that Mayor Ireton needs to be cut down to size because he may have the audacity to redistrict the city in such a way that there are four Council districts, with one at-large member serving as Council president. Even if that would be the case, though, there's no guarantee that it would necessarily dilute Camden's power if the lines were drawn in just the right manner to split the neighborhood into two districts while the third member runs at-large (and has the added bonus of being Council president.)
To be quite honest, there's not a whole heckuva lot I agree with Jim Ireton on - it's unfortunate that we didn't elect a different mayor in 2009 because help hasn't been on the way. But in this case he's correct in seeing this as part of a transition to a "strong council president" type of government. That's rather odd since it wasn't so many years ago the remainder of the county chose to entrust a strong executive with the keys to the county's treasury.
So if you see an opportunity to sign the petition to bring this to referendum, please do so. I even crossed party lines to sign since they had a copy at the Democratic tent over the weekend. I guess I make this a bipartisan effort. Otherwise, Laura would be the contact as she's spearheading the effort.