Legislative Toolkit

Just as Congress has a process for passing bills, municipalities have processes for passing ordinances. Depending on how big or complex your town government is, you might encounter a simple process or a more complex one. It could take only a few weeks or it could take months. The most common steps to get an ordinance from an idea to an enforceable law are:

1. Drafting: Ordinances can get started in different ways. Sometimes a community member brings an idea to a city councilor and asks for help drafting the legal language to make it reality. Sometimes a community group with lawyers will draft the actual legal text of the bill and send it to the sponsor for review. The text may change as debate in the city council proceeds, but there needs to be proposed legal text to start.

2. Introduction: A member of the city council (or your city’s equivalent body) needs to bring the proposed ordinance to the attention of the council and say they think it’s a good idea. This person is called the sponsor. Depending on the city’s procedures, the sponsor may introduce an ordinance by putting it on the agenda and talking about it during a meeting, by sending the draft language to an administrator who makes it available to the whole council, or some other process.

3. Committees: Often, it would take too long for every councilmember to dig into the nitty gritty of every proposed ordinance. Many city councils have committees dedicated to exploring proposed ordinances on specific subjects—like an Environmental Committee, or a Social Services Committee. Once the ordinance has been introduced to the council, the council will refer the ordinance to the committee whose subject matter expertise best fits the topic of the ordinance. When Oakland, California passed a non-discrimination ordinance protecting diverse families, the Community and Economic Development Committee considered the proposal. The committee will hold hearings and research the bill, then make a recommendation to the rest of the council on how to vote.

4. Hearings: The committee will hold hearings, or meetings open to the public, to hear input from experts and community members about the ordinance. Do people support it? What extra information might the committee need to make a decision? This is often a great opportunity for you and your community allies to answer questions the committee has, to share important information about the impact of family structure discrimination and why this ordinance is important to you. Throughout this process, amendments (changes) to the ordinance text can be suggested and approved by the committee.

5. Committee vote: Once the hearings have concluded, the committee will vote on whether to advance the ordinance to a full council vote. If it passes the committee, then the whole council will get to vote on making it law.

6. Council vote: If it passes the committee, the ordinance will get added to the agenda for a full council vote. Sometimes councils allow community members to speak in support or opposition to the final proposed ordinance. Someone on the council will make a motion to move to a final vote. If the ordinance wins the final vote—in most places this just means getting a simple majority of votes—then the ordinance becomes law.

Drafting and Introduction

You don’t need to start from scratch in drafting an ordinance to protect diverse family and relationship structures. See here for a sample municipal ordinance to protect people with diverse relationship statuses from discrimination.

The language in this sample ordinance draws from best practices and empirical literature to protect individuals with diverse relationship statuses.

While this document provides useful, vetted language that aims to cast a wide net of protection, it’s not one-size-fits-all. Cities and states differ considerably in how they handle nondiscrimination ordinances.

For example, some states have statutes that could preempt some element of municipal-level protections; for example, employment nondiscrimination. You should check to see what laws your state has that could fall into that category before proceeding.

Adapting the sample ordinance to your town can bring up tricky legal questions. We strongly advise consulting with legal experts concerning specific applications to your own municipality by contacting the authors of this toolkit who can advise with this process and provide legal technical assistance. You can reach out to the authors via email at info@open-love.org.

Strategy note: Amending an Existing Ordinance vs. Passing a New Ordinance

If your municipality already has an existing nondiscrimination ordinance (for example, protecting people against racial or gender discrimination), we generally recommend amending the existing ordinance to extend coverage to a new protected class (in this case, protection from discrimination on the basis of “relationship structures”), rather than attempting to pass a new nondiscrimination ordinance that only applies to the new class. 

Amending an existing ordinance might get you:

• More comprehensive protections. Existing nondiscrimination ordinances typically already cover a wide range of situations where people may experience discrimination, such as in employment, education, housing, health care, and public accommodations. Amending an existing ordinance like that would extend the full range of protections to a new class, whereas a new ordinance may not protect people as broadly.

• Faster passage. It’s generally easier and faster to amend an existing ordinance to add a protected class than to pass a new ordinance.

• A lower threshold for political will. Passing new legislation often requires more political appetite for change than amending an existing ordinance does. If your town is proud of its record on civil rights and your elected representatives would welcome the opportunity for the press that comes with passing something new, promoting a new ordinance could give them credentials they value. On the other hand, if your town electeds prefer to be less visible, amending an existing ordinance can seem like a smaller, easier step that still makes meaningful change.

• More predictable outcomes. An existing nondiscrimination ordinance has had more time to be tested against the relevant state and federal law by courts. Therefore, questions about how the existing language of the ordinance will be interpreted are more likely to have been settled. This also makes it easier to convince politicians to extend protections.

Passing a new ordinance might be better if:

• Your municipality doesn’t have an existing nondiscrimination ordinance. If there’s nothing to amend, your nondiscrimination ordinance can be the first.

• The existing ordinance is not comprehensive enough. Maybe the existing discrimination ordinance only applies to discrimination by city officials, not by private businesses. You could try extending this minimal protection to people with relationship diversity, but it might not help people as much as you want. You could try to extend the existing ordinance to apply to private businesses, but that might be a bigger political lift than you bargained for. In this case, passing a separate ordinance just protecting relationship diversity that applies to both private and public actors might be easier.

  The existing ordinance has other procedural problems.

• Short statute of limitations. Perhaps there is a very short statute of limitations on the existing ordinance so that it’s difficult for people to vindicate their rights unless they file a claim immediately after the discrimination happened.

• No cause of action. Maybe the existing nondiscrimination ordinance covers racial or gender-based discrimination, but doesn’t allow individuals to bring suits. In that case, extending the weak protections of this existing ordinance to people in diverse relationships may not be worth it. A new ordinance could provide stronger protections.

• Trivial penalties. Perhaps the penalties for discrimination are so low that they would be ineffective at deterring it. A new ordinance could introduce higher penalties.

• Changing any of these legal features for all types of discrimination claims can be a heavy political lift. It might be easier to pass a separate ordinance protecting just relationship diversity with the features you want: a longer statute of limitations, cause of action, and more meaningful penalties.

Whether you decide to work towards a new ordinance or amending an existing one, every ordinance or amendment needs an elected representative sponsor - like a city councilor or town board member - to introduce it. See Finding a Sponsor for more information.

The Committee Process

Many municipalities have subject-specific committees as part of their legislative process. These committees take the first pass at considering bills in their subject area, so that the entire council doesn’t have to deal with the nitty-gritty details of every bill. Some municipalities may be so small that they don’t have committees. You can check whether this step in the legislative process applies to your municipality by going to your city council or board website.

If your city council has committees, once the ordinance is introduced, it will be sent to the relevant committee for consideration. Ask your sponsor which committee it will be assigned to and how the hearing will be scheduled. You may need to do outreach to committee members to get your ordinance on the agenda. It may also be helpful to meet with committee members ahead of the hearing to ensure they have the facts behind your ordinance.

At hearings, committee members listen to testimony and ask questions. You’ll work with your sponsor to select some witnesses to testify. Focus on witnesses who can address the issue from different angles: stepparenting, multi-parent adoption, multigenerational families, hospital visitation rights for multiple partners, (life long) platonic partnerships, long term roomates, discrimination in educational, employment and healthcare settings, and the freedom to come out and speak authentically about your life and relationships, for example. 

Committee may have time limits, rules about where and when to sign up to speak, and rules about whether you may testify on behalf of others. Work with everyone to ensure they are touching on different points while staying on message and complying with time limits. Think about how you want your team’s testimony to respond to the testimony of witnesses against the ordinance.

Hearings & Votes

The committee will decide whether to send the ordinance for further study, vote it down, or advance it to another committee or to a vote of the full city council or board. Once it passes the full board, it will become law (sometimes after a certain waiting period, so people can prepare for the changes it enacts).