FAIRMONT– The Fairmont City Council on Monday was tasked with submitting names to Chief Judge for consideration of making appointments to the Charter Commission. The relationship between the charter commission and the city council has been delicate since the charter commission began meeting monthly in April of 2021.

Interim City Administrator Jeff O’Neill, while experienced as a city administrator, said that the process of appointing members has been a new experience for him.

“The way it’s set up right now, is that the city has collected all the names of the people who are interested in serving on the charter commission… those names are then submitted to the charter commission. Ten names came up,” O’Neill said.

The 10 were sent to the city council for the council to consider and then will be sent to the judge and the judge will then determine what eight will be picked as commission members.

Current members who submitted for re-appointment include Conrad Anderson, Terry Anderson, William Cieslinski, Chuck Omvig, Alice Maday, Dale Martens and Ken Reiman. New applicants include Richard Bradley, Jon Omvig and Bruce Peters.

Council Member Jay Maynard, who is on the Charter Commission, made a motion to approve the substitute resolution he had submitted to the council. The motion received a second. Council member Britney Kawecki questioned what the change was and Mayor Lee Baarts said Maynard had moved forward a change different than what was on the agenda.

Maynard said his change included removing four names from the list and also to reduce the size of the commission from 15 to 13 members.

“The names that I proposed to remove from the list are long-time charter commission members who have expressed a desire to re-submit the failed charter amendments to the voters,” Maynard said of the seven of 10 amendments that failed in the Nov. 2022 election.

Cara Brown, an attorney with Flaherty & Hood, said that if the council did desire to alter the size of the charter commission, it would require more research on her end to determine if the council was authorized to make that change.

Council Member Britney Kawecki said, “I am shocked and horrified by this. That a council member is taking it upon himself to pull people’s names who he strongly disagrees with… and for us to be asked to do this is a breach of power. I am appalled by this.”

Maynard responded and said that the council would not change the number of members itself, but would rather ask a judge to do so. He also said that one of the charter commission members had requested to change that board’s meeting time in order to deliberately cause a conflict for Maynard.

“Talk about abuse of power, and that is. That was done by one of the names I removed from this list,” Maynard said.

Council Member Randy Lubenow said that he believed Maynard had a conflict of interest because he serves on both the charter commission and city council, which has been a discussion in the past.

“I don’t know how our city attorney feels about this, but this is sad that it was brought forward like this,” Lubenow said.

Baarts asked the city attorney whether the council could table the issue to a future date and Brown confirmed that the council could table the discussion.

Before the conversation concluded, O’Neill pointed out that the names were just recommendations sent to the judge and were not yet appointments.

Maynard’s motion to move forward a list of names and decrease the number of members passed 3-2 with Miller, Hasek and Maynard in favor.