Sale of Public Property to be Settled on Ballot in May

At last night’s meeting, the City Council voted unanimously to place a proposed City Charter amendment on the May 5, 2015 ballot that would modernize East Lansing’s arcane restrictions on the City’s authority to sell certain real property. In addition to being nonsensical and far outside the mainstream in Michigan, our current City Charter provision has had a demonstrable negative impact on East Lansing taxpayers. The passage of this amendment would be a significant step in the right direction for our community. Frankly, it should have been done decades ago.

Specifically, the proposal would amend Section 4.8 of the East Lansing City Charter to change the current requirement for voter approval to sell certain real property from a 3/5 supermajority to a simple majority of the electors. The proposal would also provide for an annual adjustment of the current $4 per capita threshold for voter approval based on the consumer price index. The $4 per capita limitation will remain unchanged as the base from which future annual inflation adjustments will be made.

East Lansing’s current Charter provision has its origin in 1919, which was when the legislature adopted a provision in the Home Rules Cities Act that required a supermajority for any city to sell property valued at over $2.00 per capita. In 1944, when East Lansing adopted its City Charter, the Home Rules Cities Act provision was incorporated and remained unchanged until 1997. The legislature removed both the supermajority requirement and the $2.00 per capita threshold from the Home Rule Cities Act in 1948. Most Michigan communities followed suit. East Lansing did not, which has left us with one of the most restrictive and byzantine limitations on the power to sell property in Michigan. In 1997, the Charter was amended to arbitrarily increase the per capita threshold to $4.00, which is where it has remained unchanged for the last 18 years. The remainder of the 1919 language remained unaltered by the 1997 amendment.

To put those figures in context, had the Charter been amended in 1997 to update the threshold for inflation, the new threshold would have been $18.55 per capita. If the threshold were adjusted for inflation today, it would be $27.37. The proposal that the voters are being asked to consider in May will not address this issue directly. In the interest of simplicity and clarity, the Council opted to leave the $4 per capita threshold in place, but the aforementioned figures do provide important context that illustrates just how out of step with economic reality our Charter currently is. The addition of a prospective CPI adjustment is a modest step in the right direction.

More importantly, the proposed amendment will eliminate the minority rule provision of our current Charter restriction. I think Councilmember Beier is right in this article when she notes that the current supermajority requirement “bends” democracy. The will of the people should govern, not the veto of a minority.

Finally, let me provide a concrete illustration of how our current City Charter provision has harmed taxpayers. In 2008, the City requested voter approval to sell the parking ramp located underneath the Marriott in downtown. While 57% of the voters voted to approve the authorization to sell the ramp, we fell short of the required 60%. As a result, the City was forced to maintain ownership of this ramp and recently approved a 30-year extension of the University Place TIF plan to cover the cost of necessary maintenance. That’s $2.5 million over the life of the plan that could otherwise have been spent on other essential services and infrastructure.

The proposed City Charter amendment is a balanced and common sense approach to updating an arcane and counterproductive restriction. Its approval will help move our community and taxpayers forward. I hope you’ll join me in voting YES on May 5.

Learn more from the Lansing State Journal's article on February 4th, 2015.

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