Here’s an ugly truth: The City of Minot has 14 members of the city council, and just four of them faced competitive elections to win those offices.

Think about that for a moment. Four members of the city’s governing body – which makes spending decisions with millions upon millions of our tax dollars and passes ordinances that we must follow under penalty of law – won their seats on that council through a competitive election where their ideas were challenged by an opponent.

The other 10 are there simply because they put their names on the ballot.

That’s a problem.

Apathy in local elections is, unfortunately, nothing new. Last year, Mayor Chuck Barney won election to his first term in that office with just 1,327 votes. Write-in candidates got 1,033 votes. In all, less than 2,500 Minot citizens even bothered to vote in the mayoral race.

That’s a problem too.

Of these problems, only one can be addressed through policy reform, and a group of Minot citizens, eschewing the aforementioned apathy, have proposed significant reforms to how the city council is formulated.

The somewhat goofily branded #MakeMinot effort, launched with a needlessly complicated website at MakeMinot.com, nonetheless proposes two simple and appealing changes to the city council.

I’m not kidding when I say what they’re proposing is simple. First, they want to reduce the number of seats on the city council from 14 to five. Second, they want to elect those five members at large.

That’s it. And it’s solid reform voters should get behind.

For one thing, 14 city council members is simply too many. As currently formulated, Minot has more city councilors than Fargo, Bismarck and Williston combined.

Of the state’s largest seven largest communities there are five – Williston, Fargo, Bismarck, Dickinson and Jamestown – which have five-member commissions, with four commissioners and a mayor who also serves as a voting member. Just Grand Forks deviates, with a seven-member city council.

Even if the #MakeMinot reformers get their way, Minot’s city government would be somewhat differently formulated in that we’d have a five-member city council plus a mayor. I’d rather see Minot more closely emulate those other cities, but let’s not let the perfect be the enemy of the good.

Some will no doubt argue that reducing the council size will somehow make the council itself less democratic. But arguing that reducing the number of elected positions is somehow a diminishment of democracy is inane, especially given the number of non-competitive races fill those offices.

It’s clear our larger struggle is finding enough people who want to serve on the city council in the first place. Fewer seats will mean more competitive races and fewer city leaders who hold their offices by dint of an uncontested election.

The at-large council seats also rub some the wrong way. They’re afraid that it could mean that a majority of the councilors could be elected from one part of the city, and thus be ill-disposed to consider the concerns of other parts of the city.

That’s a valid issue, as far as it goes, but it is trumped by the need to find willing and qualified people to hold these offices. If we have two committed, engaged candidates who enjoy the esteem of significant numbers of voters but happen to be neighbors should we allow geography to immediately disqualify one from holding a seat?

Besides, Minot is not so large a political entity as to make the sort of parochial politics we see at the state and national level an issue.

Will this proposal cure voter apathy? Probably not. But it will make city council elections more competitive. It will stop our city from being governed by a city council majority who were elected because they were the only names on the ballot.

And those things, in turn, might mean our city is governed a little better.

Rob Port is a Minot resident and the editor of sayanythingblog.com.