Almost two months later than expected, Cincinnati Mayor Charlie Luken has appointed his nominees to a citizen panel that will examine how to restructure City Council elections.
Luken's nominees, announced Wednesday, are:
Don Mooney Jr., a Democrat who heads the city's planning commission, will serve as chairman of the electoral reform panel.
Jeff Berding, a spokesman for the Cincinnati Bengals who was active in the "Build Cincinnati" movement a few years ago that sought to give more authority to the mayor.
Bishop E. Lynn Brown, a local official with the Episcopal Church.
Elijah Scott, a neighborhood activist in Avondale.
They join nine other nominees whose names were submitted in June to serve on the advisory panel. The others are three people each nominated by the local Democratic and Republican parties and by the Charter Committee, the city's informal third political party.
Luken and Vice Mayor Alicia Reece -- also a Democrat -- unveiled plans for the panel weeks ago and stressed the importance of appointing its members by June 25, before City Council began its summer break.
But Luken delayed the process, upset that the GOP's three nominees were all white males. That threatened to make the panel non-representative of the city's population, which is 43 percent black, he said.
Of the mayor's nominees, two are black. Overall, four of the panel's 13 members are African-American.
Among changes that the panel will study are electing council members by district or using a proportional representation system, as well as giving executive power to the mayor and abolishing the city manager's position.
The panel will present its recommendations to City Council by Feb. 1.
Some grassroots groups, meanwhile, are considering initiative petition drives to put their own electoral reform proposals on the ballot, possibly by this fall or next spring.
Election Day '09 was a roller-coaster for election reformers. Instant runoff voting had a great night in Minnesota, where St. Paul voters chose to implement IRV for its city elections, and Minneapolis voters used IRV for the first time—with local media touting it as a big success. As the Star-Tribune noted in endorsing IRV for St. Paul, Tuesday’s elections give the Twin Cities a chance to show the whole state of Minnesota the benefits of adopting IRV. There were disappointments in Lowell and Pierce County too, but high-profile multi-candidate races in New Jersey and New York keep policymakers focused on ways to reform elections; the Baltimore Sun and Miami Herald were among many newspapers publishing commentary from FairVote board member and former presidential candidate John Anderson on how IRV can mitigate the problems of plurality elections.