Everett charter review board to present report to council

Published 1:30 am Saturday, May 30, 2026

EVERETT — The city of Everett’s charter review committee held its final meeting on Thursday, approving a draft report with nearly a dozen proposed changes to the city’s constitution that could go before voters later this year.

Many of the proposed adjustments to the charter are relatively small. They include modernizing some language around hiring and recording ordinances, reducing the number of required council meetings in a year from 48 to 36 and defining more clearly who is required to take the oath of office. (Only elected officials, a proposed change reads).

But others are more significant. Some adjustments would change the process for filing initiatives in the city, another would prevent the mayor or city council members from holding elected office outside of Everett.

All of the proposals from the 15-member committee are currently included in a draft report that will be finalized with minor changes made during the committee’s final meeting Thursday. The city council is expected to vote in June on which proposals to send to the November ballot. Everett voters will ultimately decide on the changes to the charter.

Multiple proposed changes to the charter relate the the process of putting initiatives on the ballot. In 2024, three initiatives ended up on the November ballot: two that would raise the minimum wage and one that would give the Snohomish River legal rights. One of the minimum wage initiatives and the Snohomish River initiative were approved by voters, though the river rights initiative was later invalidated by a county judge.

The changes to the charter would increase the number of signatures needed to get an initiative on the ballot. In 2024, the Everett Deserves a Raise initiative submitted about 1,500 signatures to get the proposal to voters.

The charter change would require those submitting petitions to get 10% of the total number of votes cast during the last mayoral election, or about 2,200 signatures. That’s up from a previous requirement of 5% of the total number of votes cast in the last general election. It would also reduce the threshold of signatures needed to send referendums on certain council ordinances to the ballot — that previously required 15% of the total number of votes, it would now require 10%.

The changes would also allow petitioners extra time — 10 days — to collect and resubmit signatures if some were deemed invalid by the city clerk. Another proposal would require a financial impact statement be added to the voter’s pamphlet for initiative measures.

The committee proposed the new language around referendums and initiatives to “provide clarity and certainty to voters and the City regarding these processes,” a draft of the committee’s report read.

Another proposal focuses on clarifying language regarding the eligibility of candidates to hold elected office in the city. The committee proposed the changes partly because in 2025, a judge ruled that a candidate for the Everett City Council seat in District 4, Niko Battle, was not eligible to appear on the ballot due to questions over his residency.

Those questions of Battle, who won the August primary, began because he had re-registered to vote in Everett only a few months before the primary election. The language of the city’s charter wasn’t clear if he only needed to be a registered voter at the time of filing for office, or if he’d had to have been a registered voter for at least a year prior to the election. The city’s legal staff was also unsure on the language of the charter.

That led to a legal battle where a south Everett resident, John Dimas, challenged Battle’s eligibility to appear on the ballot through Snohomish County Superior Court. A judge eventually ruled in Dimas’ favor, and the third-place candidate in the primary, Luis Burbano, was moved to the general election ballot. Burbano eventually won the seat. Battle said he would appeal the ruling; he never did.

Recent scrutiny over the residency of local candidates wasn’t limited to just Everett. In Lynnwood, former city council vice president Josh Binda faced questions over his residency after an eviction and his listing of an Everett address on a 2024 campaign filing for a U.S. House race. He denied the allegations and the county auditor later dismissed a challenge to his voter registration.

In November 2025, the Lynnwood council approved new requirements for holding elected office, requiring council members to maintain active voter registration and provide a yearly affidavit declaring their residency status. It also prevented council members from holding other paid elected offices.

The new language proposed by the charter review would clarify that candidates for office must be both a registered voter and a resident of the applicable council district for at least one year prior to the primary election date, as well as preventing mayors or council members from simultaneously holding other elected positions.

Other recommended adjustments to the charter in the committee’s report included a change allowing certain public notices to be published on the city website as well as in the city’s official newspaper of record, The Daily Herald.

Members of the committee said it wasn’t their goal to stop including the public notices in the newspaper, rather it was an effort to modernize the language of the charter and ensure that the city wouldn’t be in violation of its own constitution if the official newspaper ceased publication.

“I can definitely note that your intent was not to just get rid of the newspaper posting, but to allow for flexibility, and in fact maybe even encourage it to also be on the website, because it’s another good access point,” city staffer Jennifer Gregerson told the committee Thursday.

Another change would allow the charter review committee to meet every five years rather than once per decade.

A number of other proposals brought forward by the committee didn’t make the cut. They included possibly making council members a full-time position, implementing term limits for the mayor and city council, putting a council-manager form of government in place and a proposal that would have required the city to provide extra plain-language information to residents regarding bond packages at least 30 days before approving them.

The chair of the committee, Rod Sniffen, will present the report to the city council on June 10, he said at the Thursday meeting.

Will Geschke: 425-339-3443; william.geschke@heraldnet.com; X: @willgeschke.