Everett City Council sends 5 charter amendments to Nov. ballot

Published 1:30 am Friday, July 17, 2026

EVERETT — The Everett City Council sent five potential amendments of the city’s charter to the November ballot on Wednesday, where voters will decide on what changes they would like to see to the city’s central governing document.

The council sent forward most of the recommendations presented to them by a 15-member charter review committee, a committee that is formed every 10 years with members appointed by the mayor and city council. Those committee members met over a period of about three months hashing out potential changes to the city’s charter, presenting their final report to the council in June.

The first proposal that will appear on the ballot deals with the eligibility of candidates to hold elected office in the city. The charter review committee wanted to clear up ambiguous language regarding requirements to hold elected office, which didn’t specify if candidates had to be a registered voter at the time of filing for office, or if they would have to be a registered voter for at least a year prior to the election.

Those changes were proposed after in 2025, a court found a city council candidate, Niko Battle, ineligible to hold the seat due to questions over his residency — after he had already won the primary.

The committee’s proposed change to the charter would have required candidates to be a registered voter within the city for at least a year prior to the general election, and also required candidates to reside in the city for at least a year prior. The council voted to amend it, making the requirement to be both a registered voter and a resident at least one year before the end of filing week.

The council also discussed the possibility of only requiring candidates to be a registered voter at the time of filing, though it never came to a vote.

That proposition also includes language preventing the mayor or city council members from holding any other elected government office.

Some former council members, including State Rep. Mary Fosse, had previously held simultaneous seats on the council and in the state Legislature. Current Snohomish County Council members Strom Peterson and Sam Low also hold simultaneous seats in state government.

The second proposition would change the charter to require a minimum of 36 city council meetings per year, a reduction from the current requirement of 48. It also clarifies who would chair the meeting in the absence of the city council president or vice president.

The third proposition would change the charter to require a civil service commission — a three-person body that ensures that hiring promotions and firings of employees are based on merit — to approve hiring of only police and firefighters, which aligns with state law. The charter’s current language requires the commission to oversee hiring and promotions of all employees listed in the charter.

That process, according to the charter review committee’s report, is redundant, because the city’s recruitment procedures already require merit-based hiring and promotions, and changing the charter language will allow the city to hire employees faster.

A fourth proposition that will be on the ballot would change rules surrounding the voter initiative process. It would require initiative petitions to receive more signatures to qualify for the ballot, equal to 10% of the total votes cast during the last mayoral election. That comes out to about 2,200 signatures, up from the previous requirement of 5% of the total votes cast in the last general election.

The change would also lower the threshold of signatures required to send referendums on city council ordinances to the ballot. Those referendums required enough signatures to equal 15% of the total number of votes cast in the last general election, the new requirement would be 10% of the number of votes cast in the last mayoral election.

The proposed change also includes a 10-day period for committees to gather more signatures and resubmit them if the city clerk finds too many signatures invalid.

On top of those changes, the proposal would also require the city finance director to create a fiscal impact statement regarding any initiative measures, which would be published on the city’s website.

The fifth proposition would allow for public notices to be published on the city’s website as opposed to only allowing those notices to be published in a newspaper. (City officials previously said they would likely continue to publish notices in the newspaper, but changing the charter would give the city flexibility as times change).

The only recommendation from the committee that the council voted against sending to the ballot was a potential amendment that would have required a charter review committee to convene every five years rather than 10. Council members, however, opposed the measure, stating that it would take up significant amounts of staff time. They also said the charter should be a more stable document, and added that changes to the charter can be proposed at any time.

“If there are initiatives or topics that didn’t come up during this last review, folks can come to council and we can change the charter at any time,” council member Paula Rhyne said. “It’s not only contingent on the charter review commission reviewing it.”

The council also considered adding term limits as a potential charter amendment to the ballot. The topic was discussed by the charter review committee but it did not recommend sending it forward.

Council member Tuohy had proposed the measure as a way to ensure a wider variety of candidates would seek elected office.

“The other thing that this would do is to provide another opportunity for diversity, to ensure that we’re building diversity in our leadership and ensuring that we’re representing our changing community,” Tuohy said.

Council members voted down the term limit proposal 5-2, citing the fact that it wasn’t advanced by the charter review committee.

“For me, the fact that the charter review explicitly didn’t advance this gives me a deciding reason to vote against it at this time,” Bader said.

A member of the charter review committee, Grant Harrington, had questioned the committee’s vote on term limits due what he saw as a procedural error. He said during a June 10 council meeting that an initial vote the committee made on March 31 was to officially advance the term limits proposal to the committee’s final report, but the committee brought final language back to vote on at the next meeting, where it failed to garner enough support to end up in the report.

In a statement Thursday, city spokesperson Simone Tarver wrote that the committee used a two-step process to develop all of its recommendations, in which proposals needed a simple majority vote (at least eight votes) to develop language before the committee would vote a second time on whether to include the proposal in the final report. That second approval required 10 votes.

“The term limits proposal followed that same process. It initially received enough support to advance for drafting, then the drafted language was then brought back to the committee for a final vote,” Tarver wrote Thursday. “During that discussion, some committee members changed their positions, and the proposal did not receive the 10 votes required for final approval.”

Other proposals the committee discussed, but didn’t make the cut, included possibly making council members a full-time position, implementing a council-manager form of government and a proposal requiring the city to provide extra information to residents regarding council votes on bond packages.

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