This is a special year for Kalamazoo city elections. That’s because in 2014, Kalamazoo voters changed how they're done. Voters will now elect a mayor directly. And commissioners will serve four-year, staggered terms. This year’s election is unique, a transition from the old system to the new one. They're the biggest changes Kalamazoo has made to its city elections in nearly a century.
The charter amendments that voters approved last year don’t amount to a radical shift. Kalamazoo will still be run by a city manager, a city commission and a mayor whose role is largely ceremonial. As in the past, the mayor will be elected every other year, and will have one vote on the commission.
But as Kalamazoo city clerk Scott Borling explains, Tuesday’s election does depart from its predecessors.
“Up until this point the mayor was simply the city commission candidate who the received the most number of votes in the election,” he says.
But last year’s amendments split the mayoral election off from the commission election. Mayor will now appear as its own office on the ballot. But there’s still something in it for the commission’s top vote-getter.
“It used to be that the vice mayor was the candidate who received the second-highest number votes. Now, because the mayor is elected separately, it’s the city commission candidate who gets the highest number of votes who gets to be vice mayor,” he says.
Commissioners used to serve two-year terms. And their terms used to all come up at once. Borling says: not anymore.
“Where we are ultimately going is a place where you have six city commissioners who serve four-year terms, three of them are elected every two years.
That’s six commissioners, serving four-year terms, with those terms staggered so only three come up at once. But notice Borling says that’s where we’re going.
“Something that’s unique about this year is that in order to go from our current situation where all city commissioners are elected at the same time to the staggered terms, there has to be some sort of mechanism to get there,” he says.
So, this year, all the commission seats are up, as they would have been under the old system. The top three vote getters will be elected to four year terms, as all commission winners will be in the future. But the three candidates who come in fourth, fifth, and sixth this year will only serve two years.
“2017 is where we’ll really see what it’s going to be like from here on out,” Borling says.
The staggering means vice-mayor will be a half-term gig, since every two years, a new commission candidate will be the top vote-getter.
Kalamazoo has changed its election rules in the past. At least one shakeup happened in the Village of Kalamazoo, governed by seven at-large trustees. Borling says they chose a village president from among themselves – until 1855.
“They decided they wanted to change from one-year terms to two-year terms and they wanted them staggered, and they wanted the village president to be elected directly by the voters. And so it really mirrors what’s happening now,” he says.
Twenty-nine years later in 1884, Kalamazoo became a city. Out went the village council and president. In came what’s called a strong-mayor system, and a city divided into five wards with two aldermen from each.
“The mayor was the chief operating officer of the city, if you would,” Borling says.
But after a few decades, voters opted for something new: a commission-manager model, where an appointed official runs the city’s day-to-day business rather than the mayor.
“In the early part of the 20th century there was a strong reform movement in urban areas,” says former Kalamazoo mayor Ed Annen.
Annen served five terms as mayor between the late 1970s and the early 1990s.
“The theory was that the city manager would be removed from politics. And it was no longer – doing things to benefit electoral blocs so that you could win elections,” he says.
The National League of Cities says today, about 55 percent of US cities use some form of that system.
Kalamazoo embraced the commission-manager model in its 1918 charter, which the city still uses. It tweaked the election rules in 1921, and those are the ones Kalamazoo has followed until now.
Annen opposed last year’s amendments. He says he thinks the old system was better. Annen adds that during his time in office, people talked about bringing back a ward system, but it never became serious.
“And it really went nowhere and there was no consideration to put it on the ballot. It was just a general ‘hey, here’s a thought type of discussion,’” he says.
That makes the 2014 changes to Kalamazoo city elections the first ones to stick since 1921.
