Talking with Acting Mayor Bob Greer About Home Rule Amendments
By Julie Perine on September 10, 2014 via Connect-Bridgeport.com
During the last several Bridgeport City Council meetings, Home Rule has been a main topic of conversation. Considering that the City does not need to apply for Home Rule this year, it may all seem confusing.
City Recorder and Acting Mayor Bob Greer shed some light on the process and what the Home Rule amendments being discussed by Council could mean to the city’s future.
“Five years ago, Bridgeport was one of the four original cities designated as being eligible to utilize the Home Rule legislation adopted by the West Virginia Legislature,” Greer said. “We worked under Home Rule so we don’t need to reapply like the other 23 cities around the state that are vying for the 16 available slots under the reauthorization passed last year by the state legislature.”
But what the city is responsible for, Greer said, is to ascertain how Home Rule works within our city and identify areas within the existing West Virginia Code that we, as a city, feel are hindering operations and/or identify ideas which, if implemented, may make Home Rule work more efficiently.
“Once we identify those areas to the Home Rule Board, (the board) either gives us permission to go forward and continue to examine those areas – or not,” Greer said. “They have the authority to say yes or no.”
The ideas which Bridgeport City Council has come up with aren’t “earth shattering,” Greer said. Some are even a little controversial.
“But they are areas which we think could help us operate more efficiently as a city,” he said.
As originally proposed at the June 23 Council meeting were the following:
- Modification to the process for securing professional services;
- Modification of the process for hiring an assistant fire chief and promotion within the fire and police departments;
- Authorization of intergovernmental agreements by resolution – eliminating approval by the attorney general and requirement that each public agency have authority to complete and operate a joint and cooperative undertaking.
At that June 23 meeting, Council first sought to allow an application be made to the West Virginia Municipal Home Rule Board to amend the city’s Home Rule Plan.
Thereafter to take place was a 30-day notification period of a public hearing, the hearing itself and then adoption of an official ordinance upon two readings.
The 30-day period came to an end and that public hearing was held during last night’s Council meeting.
The final steps are in progress.
As is the case with any ordinance adopted, it must go through two separate readings during Bridgeport City Council. Once that happens, the proposed changes will go to the Home Rule Board.
“The areas we have identified have to go through two readings before they can go to the Home Rule.
“We anticipate that some or all of those are going to be advanced on the second reading at the next Council meeting,” Greer said. “Then they will be submitted to the Home Rule Board, which is currently chaired by Patsy Trecost of Clarksburg. Then, there will be a special meeting during which they will review the proposal which has been submitted by Bridgeport and they will tell us whether we are authorized to further pursue some or all of those ideas.”
