If you're an attorney like Chattanooga's city attorney Mike McMahan, you might understand what the wording means on one ordinance on the March 5th ballot.
If you're like most people, ordinance number 12677 is practically greek.
Karen Rogers came to early voting and says she tried to figure out herself what the ordinance meant to her.
"That old laws on the books that are just deemed to be archaic and stupid should be overlooked or amended," Rogers said.
McMahan says it is a way of cleaning up the city charter since there are many provisions that date back as far as 1866, and aren't really needed any more.
"We have provisions dealing with night watchmen that are no longer in the city...we have provisions dealing with inspecting milk which is now a state law function, weights and measures, which is a state law function," said McMahan.
Still, state law requires an ordinance on a ballot to have less than 200 words of description.
This one has about 60, and people working at voting locations are not allowed to answer any questions about the ballot to a voter.
Rogers said, "It's not really fair to the voter who comes in and you're trying to process the words. It really needs to be word smithed into layman's terms. So that's fine if its an ordinance but I think you need to explain what it really means to the voter."
McMahan said the changes in the charter will hardly be noticed by any citizens.
"I don't think the public will be affected whatsoever, the only think we're gonna save a little bit of money by not printing so many pages that we don't need any more."
He wrote a description of all the proposed changes that can be found on the link below.
http://www.chattanooga.gov/city-council-files/CityCharter/Proposed_%20Charter_%20Amendments_%202013/City_Attorney%27s_Explanation_as_to_Proposed_Changes.pdf
