Mayor Chris Miller broached the topic of term limits at the June City Council Workshop. Miller considers the change to be a fair compromise in the prevention of entrenchment, which is when a person becomes firmly established in a position and it is very hard to remove them. A traditional term is four years. However, he would like to apply term limits: twelve years, or 3 terms, for a council person and eight years, 2 terms, for the mayor.
Mayor Miller’s reasoning for the term limits is an attempt to get the public more active in their government. By placing a limit on terms served, he hopes the public will have more opportunity to join the Council and have more input into the Town’s future. Councilwoman Judith Fuller was adamantly against placing term limits, commenting that if people want to run for an office they would. "This is not a birthday party where we send out invitations, this is a government and if you want to be involved, you will show up," she stated. "It takes initiative to get on a council and it takes longer than one term to get things done and can take a full term to even learn the job," she said.
Councilman Chris Tillman agreed with Fuller that term limits should not be implemented because no one would run. Once someone has been placed in office they tend to stick around because no one wants to take their place. When he and Councilman James McCarron ran they were both unopposed for open seats.
Fuller also mentioned that there would be issues with inconsistent policies. Currently there are complaints about the existing charter and ordinances with regard to consistency. "There’s too much input and not enough follow through," she said. "Governments such as Taneytown are so small that it is difficult to fill vacant positions and as Fuller pointed out, term limits remove accountability because many projects can take more than one term to come to completion and when you put someone new into office you lose progress on projects. Some projects may even fail and unfortunately the failure will be blamed on the people that have left."
Miller also spoke of his own experience when running for mayor. He ran against people that had held office for a long time, a term called ‘old school or old guard' and worked very hard to win his nomination. Tillman pointed out that Miller proved that with hard work it was possible to beat an entrenched councilperson and that Taneytown has seen few members stay in office past their term to be called entrenched. Fuller wondered why it was necessary to implement legislation to prevent entrenchment for these reasons. He also pushed back at the Mayor, stating that the reason he had to work so hard was because he was never involved prior to running and was virtually unknown.
Millers’ second reason for wanting term limits was because he had heard from other potential candidates that they didn’t feel comfortable running against those that had been in office for a long time. They were afraid of retaliation from the ‘old guard’ and chose instead not to run. In response, Councilwoman Diane Foster mirrored Fuller by stating that people do not run for office because they simply do not want to and it has nothing to do with people being afraid.
Along with implementing term limits, Miller would like to lower the residential requirement for Mayor in Taneytown from five years to two, stating that towns such as Union Bridge only require one year and with so many new residents he wants people to be able to qualify if they want to run.
Resident Jim Thomas said that until the Mayor and Council could learn to work together it would be a challenge to get residents to come to meetings, and if they are not coming to meetings there is no way they will want to be on the council themselves. Longtime resident Kenyetta Brooks commented that the meetings sound uninviting and in the past she thought the public was unwelcome. She suggested the council do their own legwork and knock on doors to get the public into meetings. As of now the term limit discussion has been tabled for a future time.
