Maybe We Will Get A Charter That Will Let The Citizens Rule Again
When the Lubbock City Charter was adopted by the citizens 92 years ago, our community was a different place.
Our town only last spring celebrated its 100th birthday. When our town was founded, there were fewer than 2,000 souls living here. I would imagine that it was pretty easy to govern…just go to a couple of church meetings and the mayor would know the feelings of virtually all of the citizens.
But, as the city grew to more to more than 4,000 in its first decade, the residents realized there needed to be a little more structure to the city government in order to provide some semblance of order. So, our city fathers set out to establish a charter that would determine how we were to be governed.
Because of the municipal government scandals of the late 19th and the early 20th centuries, many American citizens were suspicious of elected officials (has that changed?) and citizens across the land began to opt for so-called professional administrators to run their cities with oversight from a paid mayor and city council.
In the mid-1910s, when the Lubbock charter was adopted, the decision was made to pay the mayor $75 a month and the council members $25. Not bad pay, at that time. The $25 check might have made a mortgage or car payment (if that had been the way folks bought things back in those days); today $25 won’t buy an inexpensive dinner for a two people.
There never has been much attempt to raise those salaries in the 40 years I’ve lived here. It seems as if our citizens don’t mind paying some bureaucrat they never see upwards of $150,000 a year and more, but they won’t trust their councilmember, who they may even see every Sunday at church, with a $100 a week stipend!
Now, for the first time in maybe two decades, our city council has decided to take a real look at the charter with the possibility of making some significant changes.
I don’t know what is on the table to be considered other than to try to remove some antiquated rules and to take steps to keep the bureaucrats from reaching into the LP&L cookie jar, but I hope something will be done to loosen the stranglehold that a few city bureaucrats have on our city and create a document that will allow those people we elect to run the town.
