Logan City council member Jeannie Simmonds
A committee of city residents representing Logan’s very diverse neighborhoods has, after more than a year of work, put together a report that was presented to the city council. It will be formally presented into the record on Tuesday night during the regular Logan city council meeting.
Then there will be additional discussion then, at some point in the future, a vote on it. It is an issue of representation, a question of how the city council should represent Logan city.
Currently the city is represented by an at-large council, but five of the six neighborhood representatives on the committee have recommended the change to a by district voting for council members.
On KVNU’s For the People program on Monday, city council members Jeannie Simmonds and Mark Anderson talked about the report.
Simmonds said the city is not bound by the committee’s conclusion.
“The charge of the committee was to explore all the options from, I would say, on one end leaving it the same. On the other end is five districts. But there are things in between, there’s a phased approach, there’s a different type of approach that they might have looked at… so that was that their initial charge and what came out of it was the report that’s been presented,” she explained.
Anderson said the report really comes down to a philosophical argument.
“But what I’ve really gotten out of the report, and I’ve been able to go through it a couple times already, I’m planning on looking at it again too. But what it really has done for me is open my eyes to some different possibilities, inspired me to go look for some more answers. And it really, really made me think about a lot of other questions.”
He said they plan to have a USU political science professor, who has done quite a bit of research on the issue, to come give a presentation to the full council in a couple of weeks. Anderson said he will explain to the council how each one of these voting systems work.
AUDIO: Mark Anderson and Jeannie Simmonds talk with Jason Williams on For the People