Charter Commission

On August 1, 1904, the voters of the City of Rochester ratified a Home Rule Charter. That document, as originally adopted, contained 17 separate chapters and 314 consecutively numbered sections, and in its initial printed version ran to almost 100 pages. In the 81 years since its adoption, the Charter has been modified on what may be described as a piecemeal rather than wholesale basis. Although the language of many of its sections has been amended and a large number of them deleted, every proposal to amend the Charter by substituting an entirely new document in its place has met defeat when it was placed before the voters.

The result was that by 1961, in the eightieth year of the Charter's existence, a printed version had become a document often difficult to comprehend. There were wide gaps between the section numbers because of deleted provisions. The organization of the sections within the document did not appear consistent because of additions and deletions to various provisions. In some cases, individual sections are related to multiple unconnected topic areas. The language of widely separated sections of the text appeared inconsistent.

For this reason, the Charter Commission in early 1985 recommended to the Common Council that the City Attorney be instructed to recodify the Charter text. Their recommendation of recodification was not designed to change the substantive meaning of any of the Charter's provisions, nor to accomplish what the voters of the City had rejected on a number of occasions - the creation of an entirely new document. Rather, the effort was to produce a printed document that would be more understandable to the reader and better organized, so that references to the rules expressed therein would be easier to find.

The Common Council concurred in the Charter Commission's recommendation, and the printed Charter text that follows represents the first real recodification of the Charter since its initial adoption. (Printed versions of the Charter, which incorporated previous amendments, are extant from 1922, 1962, 1978, and several "interim" reprints in the period January 1, 1979, through January 1, 1984. These various printings, however, retained the organization and numbering of the 1901 version.

A person reviewing this text will note that both the numbering system for chapters and individual sections has been modified from previous printed versions. The order of some sections in the printed text has been changed. In some instances, the text of a larger section has been divided into separate, smaller sections and vice versa. In no instance, however, has the language contained in the original Charter or its amendments been changed, or its meaning altered, except when it was deemed necessary to:

1. to change reference numbers to agree with renumbered chapters, sections, or subdivisions;
2. to substitute the proper section, chapter, or subdivision numbers for the terms "this charter," "the preceding section," and the like;
3. To substitute figures for written words and vice versa;
4. to correct misspelled words;
5. to    correct    manifest   grammatical    and    clerical   errors,    including punctuation; and
6. to change gender and capitalization for uniformity.