LEWISTON – City budget and personnel decisions would be off limits to voter challenge, according to a City Council majority Tuesday.

Four city councilors said they favored exempting budget and personnel decisions from public vetoes. None of the four – Renee Bernier, Lillian O’Brien, Paul Samson and Norm Rousseau – is seeking re-election in this November’s election.

Three other councilors at Tuesday’s workshop and Mayor Larry Gilbert said they’d rather give voters the chance to veto any council decision, including budgets and personnel.

“This is a government of the people and if those of us elected by the people do something in contradiction to the will of the people they should be able to challenge it,” Gilbert said. They would exempt the current fiscal year from veto, however.

Challengers would also have to muster 1,862 signatures to veto council decisions, and those decisions would be unchallenged by either petition or Council vote for at least six months, according to revisions councilors are considering to the city’s codes.

Councilors will take up the issue again at the Aug. 14 meeting. Their plan is to put new election codes before voters this November, and City Clerk Kathy Montejo said councilors must adopt the proposed changes by Sept. 4 to do that.

The issue of petition drives to challenge council decisions came to a head last year, after the city adopted a storm water utility fee to pay for culvert maintenance, street sweeping and storm sewer line projects. A group of 10 residents started a petition seeking to overturn the fee. The group failed to gather enough signatures to put the storm fee on the November ballot, however.

City ordinances require petitioners to gather 1,000 signatures to put a question on the ballot. According to ordinances, that petition is kept at the city clerk’s office. People who want to sign the petition must come to the window and ask for it.

Those ordinances conflict with both the city charter and state law, according to City Administrator Jim Bennett. He drafted a proposed rule change that would give petitioners 60 calendar days to take petitions door to door. They’d have 1,862 signatures to get their challenge on the ballot – equal to 15 percent of the number of people that voted in the last election for governor.

Bennett said most of Maine’s cities that allow voter vetoes exempt budget and personnel decisions. That gives the city some continuity.

“Voters would be allowed to challenge the council’s policing authority,” Bennett said. That would extend to planning and zoning decisions.

But Councilor Stavros Mendros said excluding budget decisions from voters vetoes would give the council too much power.

“Anything could be a budget decision,” Mendros said.

“Any decision councilors make could be argued to affect the budget. It could make everything off limits to a voters’ challenge.”