While Saturday night was filled with celebration among St. George’s newly established leaders, one ballot measure didn’t deliver the outcome the city’s mayor and council members had hoped for.
A proposed home rule charter, which would have given the city a unique form of government in Louisiana with power divided between a city council, mayor and city manager, failed to pass, with 55% of voters rejecting it.
Mayor Dustin Yates, who won a resounding victory Saturday night, supported the charter, as did city council members who either took office unopposed or won election. They said it would have created a more efficient government that truly reflected the will of the people.
Now that it's failed, those ideas are still on the table, said District 5 Councilman-elect Andrew Murrell. It will just take longer for them to come to fruition.
"At this point, we'll have to sit down and have a meeting," Murrell said. "The first elected council hasn't already been fully elected yet. So, that meeting wouldn't take place until July, or at minimum, after May, when we know who the people are going to be. Then we would talk about the next steps."
'Voters spoke yesterday'
The process to get another new charter written and onto voters ballots again would take two to three years at a minimum, Murrell said. Until then, St. George will operate under the Lawrason Act, which is the state's default government.
The system differs in a number of ways from the rejected charter. There is no city manager, and more power and responsibilities are given to a mayor rather than the city council.
"When you read about the Lawrason act ... it says the mayor sets the agenda," he said. "If the mayor sets the agenda, am I going to have an issue getting an ordinance or resolution on there that I think is important to our constituents if the mayor says no?"
After Saturday's result, Yates said it would be wise for the council not to rush into anything regarding a new charter, especially considering two council seats are headed to a runoff in May and the first elected council won't be sworn in until July 1.
"I think that the voters spoke yesterday, they told us that this wasn't the document that they wanted. So I think it would be prudent to sit back, reflect on that, and have a lot of great conversations with some of these people," Yates said.
While St. George will not have the hybrid city council-city manager form of government that Murrell, Yates and other leaders wanted right away, some things they envisioned can still be implemented. For example, St. George proponents have long said they intend to privatize some government services.
"We're going to privatize as much as we can. It's going to be essentially the same process. We just lost some of the what we felt were advantages of checks and balances in doing all this," Murrell said.
Murrell explained the only real difference is that efforts to privatize a city department or service will now have to go through Yates' office first rather than the council.
Could another attempt succeed?
Though they didn't get exactly what they wanted, Murrell and Yates both felt like Saturday was a massive victory for St. George because candidates who have been involved with the new city since its inception were elected. They said they are optimistic about the at-large and District 4 council races still to be determined.
And they point to some factors that made this particular election more difficult to pass the charter.
A common criticism from those that opposed the act was that it should have been written by a commission put together by elected representatives, not those that were appointed. Now elected officials will be writing the next proposal.
Murrell also points out that the charter was on the same ballot as four constitutional amendments, all of which voters rejected by even wider margins. That meant the election came with "a lot of opposition viewpoints," he argued.
Discussion of the charter was also tied up in a sometimes fierce debate over salaries for the new mayor, police chief and council, which some critics argued were too high. The salaries were approved separately from the charter, but St. George officials have acknowledges the two issues may have bled together.
As the newly elected leaders work out a new charter and prepare to go back before voters, the mayor hopes less vitriol and more measured conversations take place.
"There was a lot of hostility built up behind that," Yates said. "In the future, when we have things that come up, because they will come up, I hope we go at it in a more of an approach that it's okay to disagree, but we don't have to be disagreeable."