Eagan Charter Commission members are expected to be named Thursday

One applicant told the Eagan City Council that he wanted to bring the charter commission to an end. Another said he would vote at the first possible opportunity to disband it. Yet another said the city is well run and that he didn't see any reason for a charter at all.

The board they were applying to join? The Eagan Charter Commission.

The new members are expected to be named today for the Eagan board, whose job it is to determine whether the city of 63,700 should have a charter rather than statutory government, and then submit a charter to citizens for approval.

But since 91 percent of Eagan voters in November rejected a proposed charter for the second time in four years, the city's Charter Commission has been largely dismissed as irrelevant by many city leaders.

Charter opponents say the lopsided vote shows that residents are happy with the city government as is. Advocates say they lost because city officials and business leaders waged an unfair anti-charter campaign.

Eagan isn't the only metro-area suburb that's debating the merits of the home rule charter, a constitutional option that Minnesota gives cities that want a freer hand in how they're governed.

The issue also has risen in the much smaller cities of Afton and Greenfield, each of them largely rural suburbs with 3,000 residents on opposite ends of the metro area.

"The charter commission could perhaps, through its authority, do certain things that elected officials may or may not like, but if you're going to have a scenario that works successfully it really boils down to building trust," she said.

In Afton, a steep property tax hike led last month to a charter commission formed with the goal of drafting a city charter for a more responsive government. Jon Erik Kingstad, an Afton resident and attorney who led the effort, said he wanted to see more stability in policy and finances from election to election.

In Greenfield, a proposed charter currently under review was prompted by allegations that city finances were being mismanaged.

The proposed charter would bring the power of initiative, referendum and recall to Greenfield, and impose spending limitations on the City Council.

"I think [a charter] helps keep the elected officials a little more accountable and gives the general public more power," said Sue Kavanaugh, a member of the Greenfield Charter Commission.

Others say that charters, while often beneficial, don't necessarily ensure a government better than the default structure provided for most cities under state law.

Both Eagan and Afton may be fighting the history and culture of their own regions.

The great majority of charter cities in the metro area are in Anoka and Hennepin counties, perhaps because communities there developed earlier and formed larger cities with more complex populations, said Kevin Frazell of the League of Minnesota Cities.

Eagan's charter movement emerged in 2000 out of the activity of a citizens' group named Eagan OPEN.

Many of the group's members were political opponents of then-mayor Pat Anderson, marking the Charter Commission with a partisan tinge that some have never forgotten even though most of those early members are gone.

When the Charter Commission refused council entreaties to disband, council members challenged the validity of eight commission members. A judge last week agreed to let the council replace seven members whose terms expired last year.

"There's nothing inherently wrong or right with charter commissions," said Eagan City Council Member Paul Bakken, an outspoken critic of the Charter Commission. "But it can go horribly wrong. ... At this point, the history of the Eagan Charter Commission is so tainted with dysfunction that I don't think it will ever be able to produce anything that citizens find credible."

Dee Richards, chairwoman of the Charter Commission, disagreed and said that the commission and the City Council can still work together.

Unfortunately, she said, just about every one of the 20 candidates the City Council interviewed Tuesday said their goal was to break up the commission.

Afton has had its own share of charter skirmishes in the last few weeks.

Six names from Kingstad's petitions were chosen, but Schurrer also chose five people from a list that Mayor Julia Welter submitted.

Being excluded from the commission, Kingstad said, "came as a bit of a surprise and disappointment to me." He said the judge also scratched "strong" candidates who had held elected positions, such as former Mayor David Engstrom and other people who had helped organize the drive.

Two City Council members, Randy Nelson and Nick Mucciacciaro, recently objected to the council's involvement in the Charter Commission, but Welter and two other council members overruled them.

"Clearly the mayor is trying to stack this charter commission to have friends to not oppose what she wants to do," former Afton Mayor Charlie Devine said. "The whole purpose of the charter came about because people weren't happy with what the council is doing."

In Stillwater, the only Washington County city to have a charter, the charter commission acts like a watchdog of city government, said member Patrick Needham.