City of Brownsville to change terms

Brigitte Ortiz | THE RIDER

On Tuesday, the Brownsville City Commission approved charter amendments, presented by the Charter Review Committee, to set term limits for the mayor and city commission.

The purpose of the committee is to review the city charter regarding possible revisions, determine which articles and sections of the charter need amendment, deletion, or addition, develop a list of possible amendments to the charter for review by the commission and present recommendations to the commission for the purpose of calling a charter amendment election, according to the City of Brownsville website. 

The commission approved term limits for mayor and city commissioner. The committee suggested that a person may not be elected to, or serve on, the city commission, as the mayor or city commissioner, for more than two, four-year terms. A person who has held office for any amount of time of a term in which some other person was elected mayor or city commissioner may not be elected to the office more than once. 

Elizabeth Walker, assistant city manager, said, “The council is giving direction to staff to wordsmith propositions, legally, in consultation with the city attorney’s office so that those propositions will be embedded in the election order and then will appear on the ballot.” 

Walker said whatever the commission decides to include in the election order gets adopted at the next meeting. Then, citizens will be able to vote on each of the propositions on the May 1 special election. 

Rene E. De Coss, city attorney, said whoever is running this May will not be affected by the law change because it has not been decided by the voters, but in the next election, everyone on the board will be affected.  

In other business, the city commission approved that all appointed judges serve a term of four years instead of two. 

“This is proposing it continues to be a city manager’ s appointment,” De Cross said. “It wouldn’t affect anybody that is there now, right now, everybody who is a judge in the City of Brownsville that is currently serving an appointment. So, once that appointment expires, should that person be renewed by the city manager, at that point the new appointment would be four years.”