Photo by Erin Nelson.
Homewood Council President Alex Wyatt speaks during a meeting at Homewood City Hall on March 27.
Homewood residents who want to change the city’s form of government will have to wait until at least April before they can vote to make that happen.
City Council President Alex Wyatt gave an update on the process of possibly shifting to a city manager-council government during the council’s finance committee meeting on Jan. 8.
“The first step, or the next step, is to get a petition,” Wyatt said. “We have to do a petition that's signed by a certain number of voters.”
The goal was to have someone in place to handle the petition around the end of January, Wyatt said.
According to state law, the petition must be signed by 4% of the city’s population as counted in the last census, which would be 1,057 people. All of the signers must be qualified voters in the city of Homewood.
The council president said work is already being done to draw up new council districts according to the census data. The council hopes to offer a government that will have four council members elected by district and a mayor who is elected at-large and votes as part of the council.
That compares to the current 11-member council, which includes two representatives from each of five council districts and a council president elected at-large.
Under the proposed city manager-council form of government, the city manager would handle the day-to-day operations of the city.
“Once we get the map and the petition completed, then the referendum has to happen within 90 days of the petition being submitted to the probate court,” Wyatt said. “Once we have an idea of when the petition will be completed, then we can schedule the referendum.”
Homewood will have to wait until voting machines are available. Those machines are scheduled for use in the March 4 general election primaries.
“That's why we're looking at some time in April,” he said. “The earliest [a referendum could happen] would be April.”
If a majority of voters agree to the change in government, that change would not happen until November 2025, when the new council takes office.
“This [current] form of government will stay until that point. The only difference will be that we will — if this goes through — we would endeavor to hire a city manager that would sit without all of their duties until such time as the new government took place. But that would allow the transition to be in place and wouldn't require a year after the new government took its seats to find someone,” Wyatt said.
An impromptu report came during the finance committee meeting as Barry Smith gave her fellow council members a look at renderings of budgeted upgrades to Central Park. Smith is the council’s liaison to the park board.
“I've been able to see all the plans, but nobody else has,” she said. “I just kind of want everybody to see.”
Smith’s excitement over the project was evident.
“We've never had a playground in the city that was fully accessible to anybody,” she said. “The fact that we're going to have one that people in wheelchairs can access, kids in wheelchairs, ... they can play with their friends on the same toys, when previously they would have had to sit on the sidelines and just watch everybody else have fun.
“I love it. I do love it,” Smith added. “I think it's a fantastic thing, and I'm so excited about it.”
