What’s wrong with letting Arlington voters weigh in on changes to council term limits?

The Arlington citizens committee appointed to advise the City Council on whether to allow voters to consider a modification to the city’s term-limits system has produced some puzzling reactions.

The committee is recommending extending the length of City Council and mayoral terms by two additional years and permitting voters, if they wish, to return a former member to the council after two years out of office.

That’s it. Just those two changes to the current method of organizing the city’s governing body.

Some committee members, and a number of citizens who appeared before the panel and are opposed to allowing voters to consider such a change, have expressed themselves with comments that lack factual support.

A common reason they have cited is that voters have already decided what they wanted in a previous election. While that may be true for many, about 37,000 voters opposed the change.

Moreover, some speakers on the committee and others appearing before them explained that they would like to have an opportunity to modify the system with the two adjustments the committee wants the council to put before voters in November.

Some cited what they described as a lack of understanding of certain of the provisions that were included in the petition that resulted in the 2018 vote to amend the city charter. One committee member, who voted for the change in that election, said she considered her vote as a starting place to further perfect the new system.

Then there was a citizen who had signed the petition and later felt that he was misinformed by those gathering signatures. He voted against the new system, then filed suit against the city to pursue his concerns.

There was even some rhetoric that questioned the committee’s work by citing “white privilege” and racism as the motives behind developing the recommendations to the council.

That struck me as odd because the makeup of the Arlington City Council has been historically diverse. There have been two Hispanic members on previous councils, one of whom won his seat by defeating an incumbent white member. After the November election, there will be two Hispanic members of the new council.

In 1997, voters elected the city’s first Black mayor, Elzie Odom. He won his race by getting more votes than a white City Council colleague who was also seeking that office. He won a majority of Arlington voters even though the city’s Black population numbered less than 10 percent of its citizens.

His daughter is now a member of the council, along with another Black member who won his seat by defeating a white incumbent.

The highest calling to resolve the question of whether to make these two changes or not is to put the question before voters. If the opponents of doing that are right, then voters will simply vote it down and no change will take place.

Arlington has established term limits for its mayor and council members. There is no proposal coming forward to reverse that. The question is only whether to modify that to allow voters additional power to shape their city’s governing body.

Arlington has a remarkable record of achievement over the past seven decades, growing from a small water stop town to a major city with ever-increasing opptortunities for residents to follow their dreams and pursue a higher quality of life.

The stability and continuity of its elected leaders will ensure that Arlington’s best days will always be the ones that lie ahead.