Corvallis City Councilors will be sending voters a sweeping plan to shrink the City Council from nine members to six, lengthen councilor terms from two years to four, and impose term limits for the first time in the city’s history. You’ll see this on your November ballot.
Council approved the referral to voters 7 to 2. Charlyn Ellis and Paul Shaffer were opposed.
The measure is the product of six months of work by the Charter Review Task Force Phase 2. Convened by Mayor Maughan, the group includes elected officials and community volunteers. The task force’s recommendations were unanimous. According to their final report, Corvallis’ current council structure has increasingly set Corvallis apart from — and, in the task force’s view, behind — comparable Oregon cities.
There have been ongoing concerns that two-year terms implicitly overly prioritize campaigning and sometimes means too many councilors leave the body all at same time. Four-year terms can be staggered.
Likewise, recruiting candidates to fill nine council seats in a town the size of Corvallis has proved difficult. Often a ward will have only one candidate running, even if the seat is open.
The task force’s report offered illustrative data. A 2019 League of Oregon Cities survey found Corvallis was a statewide outlier, with nine wards and concurrent two-year terms found nowhere else in Oregon.
A 2026 comparison of ten similarly sized Oregon cities showed six councilors is the most common council size, and that nearly all of those cities use staggered four-year terms. Almost half have some form of term limits.
Research presented by task force member Danielle Chambers, drawing on organizational-behavior literature, concluded that smaller governing bodies — in the range of five to six members — tend to be more productive, communicative, and less prone to factionalism than larger ones.
A tenure analysis by Councilor Jan Napack found that, between 1973 and 2024, Corvallis council terms turned over an average of 4.8 new members each election — with some elections replacing seven of the nine seats at once. The task force argued this level of turnover erodes institutional knowledge and disrupts long-term planning.
The task force also weighed the political and practical case for bundling everything into one ballot measure rather than several. Because reducing councilors and extending terms both amend the same charter section, members felt separate measures could confuse voters and complicate drafting. They also pointed to statewide election results as evidence that combining these specific reforms — councilor terms, term length, and term limits — has a strong track record with voters when they’re considering city charter reforms.
What’s being recommended, point by point
- Reduce the City Council from nine members to six. The task force concluded that Corvallis’ council was too large to function effectively and that a smaller body would improve deliberation and give each councilor more staff and budget support. Members considered both six and seven as options before settling on six, aligning Corvallis with the majority of Oregon cities its size.
- Reduce the number of wards from nine to six, keeping one councilor per ward. The task force also debated switching to three wards with two councilors each — a model used elsewhere in Oregon that would let voters elect a councilor every two years even under four-year terms. Ultimately, members judged that redrawing to six wards, each still electing one councilor, would be a less disruptive transition and preserve stronger ties between councilors and their neighborhoods.
- Extend councilor terms from two years to four, with staggered elections. Under the new system, councilors from even-numbered wards would be elected in federal presidential-election years and councilors from odd-numbered wards in federal midterm years, so that only part of the council turns over at any given election. The mayor’s term would remain four years; unchanged.
- Impose term limits for the first time: three consecutive terms for councilors and for the mayor. Limits would apply separately to each office — meaning a councilor could still run for mayor without it counting against a prior councilor term limit — and only consecutive terms would count, so someone could run again after sitting out. Partial terms of less than two years would not count toward the limit, nor would any terms served before January 2027.
- Manage the transition with a one-time special election. To move from the current nine-member, concurrently elected council to the new staggered six-member council, all six new council seats would be filled in a single election in November 2028. Councilors elected from odd-numbered wards in that election would serve an initial two-year term, rather than four, purely to establish the staggered cycle going forward.
The task force considered several other charter changes during its review — including updates modeled on the League of Oregon Cities’ model charter and the removal of two outdated sections — but decided those did not have enough urgency or political support to include in this year’s measure. It is passing those recommendations along for a future phase of charter review, along with two items — mayoral term length and mayoral voting power — that the task force studied but ultimately decided not to change, concluding that four-year mayoral terms and tie-breaking-only voting power remain the right fit for Corvallis.
What’s next
If approved by voters in November, the changes would take effect starting with the November 2028 election, and as stands, the council would need to formally redraw the city’s six wards by the end of 2027.
There has been some talk among council that getting a ward map done before this fall’s election may offer a certainty to voters that would mean more support. Council could do that with an ordinance.
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