City staff presented a detailed roadmap for a comprehensive charter review at the Charter Review Committee meeting on Nov. 19, urging consistent drafting conventions, an expanded index of defined terms and targeted updates to several substantive sections of the Santa Clara Charter.

Staff said key topics for early review include (1) clarifying the 30‑day residency requirement in section 600 that determines candidate eligibility timing, (2) modernizing ordinance-adoption and publication language in sections 805–815, (3) reviewing Article 3 succession language that the staff described as largely historical and potentially surplus, and (4) revising civil service provisions that the staff said appear out of alignment with current city practice and state law. ‘‘There was a general discussion about making sure that the text be made understandable to a layperson,’’ staff told the committee, urging plain-language definitions and consistent conventions.

On civil service matters, staff and the subcommittee noted that the charter’s list of unclassified employees is out of date and recommended switching to broader, class-based descriptions so future organizational changes are not constrained by obsolete job lists. Sue Reuter, who staffed the civil‑service subcommittee, told members that the civil service sections were largely unchanged since the 1950s and ‘‘need to be updated in order to become a workable document and one that is accurate to current city operations.’’

Staff said benchmarking will be part of the project: they are assembling charters from roughly 121 California charter cities and plan to circulate recent packets used in successful local reviews, including material from Chula Vista, and to monitor work in Sunnyvale and other nearby cities. Staff described a three-level system to classify proposed changes: Level 1 (non‑substantive corrections and reorganization), Level 2 (alignment with law or current practice), and Level 3 (significant restructuring of government, high sensitivity items such as moving from part‑time to full‑time council). The committee discussed that Level 3 changes would require special caution and possibly explicit council direction.

A public commenter, Wanda Buck, asked whether ethics provisions would be addressed; staff confirmed that the boards‑and‑commissions ad hoc subcommittee would likely consider ethics questions and return a recommendation to the full committee.

Staff described the drafting workflow: subcommittees and stakeholders provide input, staff prepares strikeout/underline draft language in sections, and the full committee will review agreed drafts in sequence rather than waiting for a single comprehensive package. Staff committed to uploading PowerPoint materials and distributing suggested amendments in advance whenever feasible to give committee members time to review prior to formal drafting sessions.

Next steps: subcommittees will continue their work, staff will circulate benchmarking resources and draft language to the committee, and the committee will reconvene to consider section-by-section strikeout drafts.