A bill that would have rewritten the Eagleville city charter failed to be approved because it did not make it through the state Senate before the General Assembly adjourned on May 21.

The House version of the bill, House Bill 4271, was approved unanimously on May 20, and the Senate version, Senate Bill 4279, had passed on the second of three considerations in the Senate by May 13.

After the bill was approved by the House, it was to go to the office of the chief engrossing clerk to be "retyped without error or erasures" and then transmitted to the Senate. Sen. Bill Ketron said that the bill never made it to the Senate after it was engrossed.

"It passed the House and was being engrossed to send on a message calendar to the Senate for passage," Ketron said. "It never got forwarded from the House to the Senate for us to pass it before we declared sine die."

Ketron said he was not even thinking about the charter by the last hectic day of the session.

"We were dealing with the $28 billion budget and things were getting added on over in the House on bills that we had never looked at before, and things were going back and forth on message calendars," he said. "We started at 8:30 that morning and I got home at 1 o’clock Thursday night."

Ketron said he probably would call Mayor Nolan Barham to apologize but said the bill not passing was "nothing of my doing."

"It just didn’t make it back on the message calendar after it was inscribed by the clerk in the House to get sent to the Senate clerk’s desk to be put onto a calendar for us to vote on," he said.

Rep. Curt Cobb said a lot of bills did not make it all the way through the Legislature because of time.

The proposed charter rewrite was similar to what most towns have now and the only controversial part of it appeared to be changing the residency requirements for city council candidates, he said. The revised charter, however, would not have affected the 2008 election, he said.

Whoever is on the council for the next General Assembly session, which begins in January 2009, can decide if they want to proceed with changing the charter and "can change it anyway they want to change it," Cobb said.

The city of Eagleville did not send the proposed charter rewrite to the state until less than two months before the two-year legislative session was to end. Mayor Nolan Barham said earlier that he forwarded the proposed charter rewrite to the state soon after the councilmen approved it at their March 27 meeting.

Both Ketron and Cobb had the legislative legal staff review the proposal before it was filed for introduction in the Senate on May 7 and in the House on May 6.

"When there is just a section of a charter changed, it is pretty simple," Cobb said earlier. "But when it is a whole charter change, they have to look at the old charter and the new charter and go through them item by item and that takes a long time."

A number of citizens had protested the proposed charter change, primarily because of the change in the candidate residency requirements. Some also suggested adding a recall provision and a nepotism policy, and they wanted to put in the revised charter a petition and referendum provision that is in the current charter.

The revised charter would have required city council candidates to have lived in the city limits for a year while the current charter also allows those who live in the Eagleville precinct but who own property in the city to be a candidate.

Petitions containing signatures of more than 60 city residents were presented to Ketron and Cobb asking them to not sponsor the legislation concerning the proposed city charter rewrite.