Dalton’s new city charter was recently signed into law by Gov. Brian Kemp.
The charter was finalized and approved by the mayor and council in November after more than a year of work by city leaders and staff to revise the founding document. It was submitted to the state legislature earlier this year and approved.
The city’s leadership began the process of drafting a new charter in 2022. The previous charter had not been revised since the 1970s, and much of the document was more than 100 years old with some sections dating to Dalton’s founding in 1847. Many sections of that charter were out of date and no longer reflected current practices or state laws.
City officials worked with the city’s legal counsel from the Minor Firm as well as city department heads and staff to draft the new charter and then fine-tune the document after input from elected leaders and members of the public. The process included a thorough review of city ordinances and state laws to ensure there were no conflicts with the new charter.
“It was a project that was 50 years in the making,” said City Administrator Andrew Parker who oversaw the effort to draft the new charter. “Once it was approved by the General Assembly and recently signed by the governor into law, it was a small celebration internally because for those involved in the elected body and the staff that had a hand in putting it together, that was kind of special to see it had made it finally through the process finally of being signed into law.”
“Hopefully this charter will serve the city for the next 50 years before it ever needs to be updated again,” Parker added.
City leaders held multiple work sessions and public hearings with committees made up of residents and with residents to solicit feedback on the new document. The resulting document featured changes that were extensive enough that they could not be enacted solely by a vote of the mayor and council and instead needed to be enacted by the General Assembly.
“No, the old charter didn’t necessarily correlate to the practices of today where you have working committees appointed by the council that provide oversight to various departments and functions of city government and then you have an administrator that provides operational management to the city and so (the new charter) basically just cleaned up some of those practices,” Parker said. “It doesn’t really change a whole lot of the day-to-day function, it just modernized it to what we’re doing today.”
In future meetings, the mayor and council will review the city’s Code of Ordinances to ensure they work in concert with the new charter.
Submitted by the city of Dalton.