One wrong word in the Cincinnati charter amendment on the ballot this November has city officials scrambling to find answers and correct the mistake that would affect council pay.
The clock is ticking. Early voting starts Tuesday.
City councilperson Betsy Sundermann has called a committee meeting on Thursday afternoon to get to the bottom of what city officials said was an accident caused by a rushed petition process.
The error was first revealed by The Enquirer Wednesday.
"We need to tell voters what they're voting on, and what they signed to get on the ballot," Sundermann said. "If there's something on the ballot they did not sign a petition for, what are they going to do about it?"
She asked the law department to draft an ordinance with the correct language to present to the Education, Innovation & Growth Committee committee at 12:15 p.m. on Thursday.
The sweeping charter amendment proposed by state Rep. Tom Brinkman, a Mount Lookout Republican, would lower the pay of city council members and make seven other changes to the city's charter. His amendment would lower the pay of city council members to the median household income as determined by the U.S. Census, which is $46,000.
But the language the city passed for the charter amendment that will appear on the ballot would keep council pay basically the same.
In the section tying council pay to the income of city residents, the phrase "median household income" was changed – mistakenly, he said – by City Solicitor Andrew Garth to "median family income."
That's a difference of $17,000.
Council members make $60,000 and $7,000 in benefits. The most recent median family income for Cincinnati would set total compensation with benefits at $62,900, not the $46,000 figure Brinkman and the petitioners intended.
City officials claimed the city ordinance used an advance copy. Brinkman said none of the earlier versions used by the petitioners had the wrong language in it. He doesn't know where the city's version came from.
"Somebody would have had to recreate it for it to have been wrong," Brinkman said.
So if it passes, what will become law? It's not clear, wrote City Solicitor Andrew Garth in a memo sent to the mayor and council.
Garth later told The Enquirer Wednesday afternoon they received guidance from the Hamilton County Board of Elections that the original petition language, which would set council salary at $46,000, would become law if passed by the voters.
But there will likely be lawsuits, Garth said.
"It may take a court to provide a mechanism to resolve the issue definitively," Garth wrote in the memo on Wednesday. "But the Law Department and the City Administration will cooperate to follow the will and the intent of the electorate."
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