It is July 15th at 6 45, and I would like to welcome everybody to a special uh workshop of city council.

Um this workshop is for the purpose of introducing uh the charter review amendments.

Um we'll move on to item two, which is the proposed added uh additional legislation for July 15, 2025.

Item 25-111 is an ordinance submitting to the electors of Hudson a proposal by the 2025 Charter Review Commission to amend the preamble sections 2.01, 3.01, 3.02, 3.08, 3.10, 3.11, 3.01, sorry, 4.01, 4.03, 5.02, 6.03, might as well say everything.

6.04, 7.01, 8.04, 8.05, 8.06, 8.07, 9.01, 9.04, 9.06, 11.01, 12.01, 12.02, and 12.03, and to repeal section 8.08 and to create sections 6.05, 7.05, and 8.09 of the Charter of Hudson and declaring an emergency.

Um, the chairman of the Charter Review Commission, Mr.

Rob Kegler is here to review those amendments with us tonight.

Thank you very much for coming in tonight.

I appreciate the the many many months of your work that you put into this along with the entire board.

Um, could you review them a bit?

We've got, I believe, eight items.

Eight.

It ends up at eight ballot issues.

It's just a matter of the sausage machine that it takes to get there.

Exactly.

Um good evening, uh, members of council.

It's a it's a pleasure to be here on behalf of the commission.

Um, when trying to make the best and most economic use of your time, I had in front of me a 27-page ordinance that was the result of seven months of work by the commission, and I was trying to think of how to distill that down.

So I did a uh PowerPoint presentation and it's queued up here.

So there are just 20 slides in this.

I am not going to read this uh point by point.

This is I I see this more as a go-to uh tool that uh you all could use.

The communications office could use for um distilling things down.

The um if you think about the the most micro is the 27-page ordinance.

Uh this is a 20-slide PowerPoint presentation.

There are towards the end, there are eight individual sheets, one kind of I'll call them a fact sheet on each individual ballot issue, which I'll get to.

And then right before that, there's a single sheet that lists all eight ballot issues just in simple um easy to understand terms.

So if you'll if you'll bear with me for uh a couple minutes, I'll just go through the go through what I can real quick with you.

So um this is the report and recommendation of the 2025 charter review commission to city council.

If you go to the next slide.

Um just gonna I've got some information for you about the charter, about the section that uh dictates what the charter review commission is supposed to do, who the charter review commission members are, some facts by the numbers, how we went about our process, just some info on some suggestions that were brought forward that are not included in the recommendations, and then a summary of the recommendations and then next steps and questions.

Okay, next page.

Um first for people who don't know the charter is like your local constitution, state law and now you to have it in simple terms that it a charter allows a municipality to set its own course.

We've only had a charter in Hudson since 1958, but Hudson, as we all know, was around a long before that.

Hudson was originally the township was founded in 1799.

The village uh was incorporated in 1837.

Uh that's why uh Mayor Anzevino is the 57th mayor of Hudson because there's been 57 mayors since 1837.

Uh as I mentioned the charter was first effective in the late 50s.

Um it was between 1958 and merger, it was amended five times on a kind of irregular basis.

Uh merger, um, the the village became a city in 1990 when its population went over 5,000, and then the merger between the township and the city happened in 1994.

If you'd scroll down just a little bit, and then after merger, it's been uh the charter's been amended, I think eight or nine times the asterisk is because the charter was amended twice in 1995, right after merger, once in May to incorporate the merger conditions, and then again in November, and then you'll notice after merger per the amended charter, it's been looked at every five years since then with an additional um amendment in 2009, which related to some um architectural issues.

Next what does the Charter Review Commission do?

Um section 313.02 of the charter requires the council to appoint a commission anywhere between odd number between seven and eleven members.

Um every five years the charter is supposed to be reviewed.

We as members serve until the date of the next election.

We review the charter, make recommendations that we believe deem in our in our judgment to be advisable, and then it says in that section of the charter that count council shall submit the same to the electors at the next uh general election.

These are the members.

Um it was a great pleasure to serve with them.

I'd like to uh commend council for appointing such a um uh an introspective and inspired group of individuals.

Everybody brought something to the table.

Everyone was there for almost all of the meetings, if not all of them, and we had a great um, I I would say a great positive um experience.

Next by the numbers, typo in my letter, I said we met 12 times.

We only met 11 times between January and June.

We met for a total of 21 hours and 42 minutes.

Um we at every single meeting we provided the public with two opportunities at the beginning and the end of the meeting for public comments.

Fifteen people commented.

We accepted uh comments through the end of April, 71 total suggestions.

We tracked them on a spreadsheet, and we tracked not only the suggestions but the date and what the commission did.

Uh in some cases, we discussed reviewed and ultimately acted or didn't act upon changes at multiple different meetings, depending on information that we asked for in response to talking about it for the first time.

Uh next.