This November Stephenville voters will have the opportunity to choose whether to amend our city charter. Voters who want to strengthen democracy should support the amendment to increase the number of consecutive terms a city council member can serve from two to three.
A few years ago voters added to the city charter a provision to limit city council members to two consecutive terms. At the end of his second consecutive term a council member who wanted to serve longer would have to leave office and wait at least a year before trying to regain a seat on the council.
This provision, whatever its merits, reduced the right of the voters of Stephenville to choose whom they wanted to serve on the city council. Moreover, it reduced the opportunity of city council members to acquire the knowledge and experience necessary to provide effective oversight of the city bureaucracy.
During my own time on the city council, I found the men and women serving in the various city departments to be honest, competent, and dedicated to pursuing the best interests of the city and its citizens. But if democracy is to flourish, unelected public servants must still be subject to supervision by democratically elected officials. And to effectively supervise the unelected, the elected must have the knowledge and insight necessary to develop effective public policies to be implemented by the unelected, and to supervise their implementation as well.
Acquiring such knowledge can be difficult even under the best of circumstances. After all, the unelected officials are, for the most part, full-time and well-paid professionals. City council members, whatever the city, are more likely to be part-time and poorly paid amateurs (when I was on the Stephenville city council the pay was $200.00/month for city council members and $400.00/month for the mayor, but since I was also a state employee I was barred by law from taking any compensation at all). The expert knowledge of the unelected but full-time official is likely to be far greater than that of the part-time elected official. Indeed, elected officials may well become at least partially dependent on appointed officials for knowledge and information. So while the elected may be supervising the appointed, they’ll be doing so on the basis of information supplied by the appointed.
The best way to reduce this power imbalance is to give the elected officials more time to acquire the knowledge necessary to intelligently judge the work of the appointed officials. And this can be done by allowing the elected officials to serve three, rather than two, consecutive terms.
Of course, granting the elected officials the opportunity to serve more consecutive terms doesn’t guarantee that elected officials will invariably use their newly-acquired time to actually develop more knowledge and insights. But for that there is also a remedy: A free election to vote the indolent and incompetent out of office.
It must be remembered that to weaken or even eliminate term limits for elected officials by no means guarantees them more time. The weakening or even elimination of term limits in no way weakens or eliminates the right or the opportunity of the people to vote a council member out of office for any reason they choose, or for no reason at all. In fact, the longer a council member serves, the more decisions he must make, and the more likely he will be to make more enemies of people who don’t like his decisions and who will therefore exercise their absolute right to vote him out of office.
So when the citizens go to the polls next month, they should vote to increase the number of consecutive terms a council member may serve from two to three, and if they ever have the opportunity to eliminate term limits entirely, they should do so as well. The weakening and even elimination of term limits for Stephenville city council members will give the voters more power to choose whom they want for city council, and the city council members more power to acquire the knowledge, skills, and expertise needed to be effective. And the right of the voters to throw city council members out of office if, as, and when they choose will be preserved intact as well.
Malcolm L. Cross has lived in Stephenville and taught politics and government at Tarleton from 1987 until 2023. His political and civic activities include service on the Stephenville City Council (2000-2014) and on the Erath County Republican Executive Committee (1990 to the present). He was Mayor Pro Tem of Stephenville from 2008 to 2014. He is a member of St. Luke’s Episcopal Church and the Stephenville Rotary Club and does volunteer work for the Boy Scouts of America. Views expressed in this column are his and do not reflect those of The Flash as a whole.
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