Municipalities across Arkansas will say goodbye to their city aldermen in August and say hello to council members.
Act 879, approved this year by the state Legislature to take effect Aug. 1, changes the terminology for about 400 of the state's municipal governments, replacing the "alderman" title used for city council members with the generic "council member."
Also officially changed is the "aldermanic" form of municipal government, replacing that with "mayor-council" instead. Though the former is in the state statute, the latter has already been used for local governments that have an elected mayor and a city council, said Don Zimmerman, executive director for the Arkansas Municipal League, which represents the interests of cities across the state.
Saying council member instead of alderman will be the more noticeable change for municipal officials and the public, especially during election years.
Ballots that have said "Alderman" before the name of someone running for re-election must now read "Council Member." Cities' websites, business cards for officials and any other references to aldermen will need to be changed, with the costs to cities expected to be minimal. Candidates who have used "Alderman" on campaign signs will need to replace those out of their own pockets.
"I think several of them will just wait until they need to get new business cards," instead of reprinting them, Sherwood Mayor Virginia Hillman Young said recently. "It won't be a significant thing. I think the hardest thing is retraining ourselves in how to refer to them."
Eliminating gender-specific language wasn't as much of a nod to political correctness as it was an update to fit the times, said Jewell White, a former City Council member in the western Arkansas city of Paris, in Logan County, and the one who initiated the changes.
White worked as finance director for the Paris city government for 24 years before retiring. Five years after that, White ran for and was elected to the Paris City Council, serving one term before retiring at the end of last year. She said being referred to as alderman and not alderwoman didn't "particularly" bother her, but the terminology just seemed archaic.
"I just kind of observed that, through the years, more and more women were becoming involved," White said last week. "I thought we needed to upgrade the terminology as a benefit to the ladies who were serving.
"Of course, those laws we had were made back in the 1880s when no one ever dreamed that a woman would serve," she said. "Times have changed. It was an upgrade I believed we needed to do to get everybody on an equal basis."
The Paris City Council agreed to sponsor White's resolution for the changes to take to the Municipal League State Convention in 2016. The convention adopted the proposal as part of the league's legislative package, Zimmerman said. State Rep. Roger Lynch, R-Lonoke, sponsored House Bill 1733, which later became Act 879 and was signed by Gov. Asa Hutchinson in April. Lynch also sponsored House Bill 1734, regarding the mayor-council terminology, which became Act 878.
Lynch, in his first term as a state representative, said he was "more than happy to help her" get the terminology changed. The bill eliminating the alderman title sailed through the House but temporarily stalled in a Senate committee before being approved.
"It took more effort than I thought it would to get it through," Lynch recalled last week. "I thought it was a pretty simple change. Some people just don't like change."
Lynch credits White with having the initiative to drive the updating of the statute's language. Any costs for cities making the name change will "be negligible," he said.
"She was the one that had the desire to see that change happen, and I was more than happy to help her with it," Lynch said. "She was the lady who came up with the idea that it needed to be brought up to modern terminology. I'm sure she thought it was more appropriate to be a council member other than an alderman."
White said she really doesn't see the change being "a big thing for anyone."
"Everybody was mostly being called a city council member anyway," White said. "But, legally, when you ran for office, you had to run as alderman. That was the legal term. I think most are already used to saying city council member a lot."
The change did have at least one unforeseen obstacle to overcome when Municipal League officials took the idea to cities around the state, Zimmerman said.
"I think more women opposed the change than did men," Zimmerman said. "That was a little bit surprising. The men were ones who would agree with her [White]."
White said, "We thought that was kind of strange."
Metro on 07/02/2017