By: Mike Koury | Woodward Talk | Published March 24, 2026
FERNDALE — Ferndale will have two questions on the ballot for residents come the August primary election.
The two ballot questions for the Aug. 4 election concern the removal of the city’s Civil Service Board and another to establish the terms and conditions of the operation of the Ferndale Policemen and Firemen Retirement System through ordinances.
The proposals were approved by the Ferndale City Council at its Feb. 23 meeting.
According to City Manager Colleen O’Toole, the Civil Service Board was written into the city charter long before the city had a centralized Human Resources Department and, in some cases, existed before the city had union contracts for a lot of its positions.
O’Toole said that at this point the board is redundant because 83% of the city’s staff is covered by collective bargaining agreements.
“The terms of those agreements would prevail over whatever’s in the city charter, and we have that centralized, professional Human Resources Department now to handle matters of grievances, you know, hiring, termination, background checks, wage studies, things like that,” she said. “At this point, the group hasn’t really had any work to do, but it has to meet because it exists in the charter. So, it’s really just a way to clean up kind of an operational redundancy and move forward with how we are operating in a more modern environment.”
Council member Donnie Johnson, who first got involved with Ferndale through its Civil Service Board, recounted his second meeting where everyone said, “Can we get rid of this?”
“It has taken …10 years, nine years, to finally get to this point,” he said. “The board meets at 8 a.m., and usually we would gavel in, call attendance and then gavel out and then go to work. Our record meeting was 45 seconds. So, it’s a thing that the charter — you have to meet, right? It’s a requirement in the law currently for the city. So, I just think it’s one of those artifacts that it’s got to go. I’m glad we’re finally getting around to it.”
The other ballot question would change how Ferndale governs its Police and Fire Retirement System and allow the city to combine it with the General Employee Retirement System and govern them via ordinance. A previous ballot measure was approved for the general retirement system.
“The change would take the terms of the police and fire retiree pension system out of the state charter and allow for it to be governed by ordinance,” O’Toole said. “By governing it by ordinance, we can combine the assets on paper of the general employee and the police and fire pension system so that we reduce our pension contribution amount.”
According to the city, its General Employee Retirement System is funded at a rate of 402%, while the Police and Fire Retirement System is funded at 82%.
By combining the systems, O’Toole said they can help bring police and fire up to 96% and save Ferndale approximately $500,000 in how much it has to contribute to the Police and Fire Retirement System. The city has to make contributions to the system until it reaches 100% funded under state law.
“We take the excess funds from the general employee and attribute it because now they’d be under the same accounting,” O’Toole said. “We’d be able to attribute that money to the Police and Fire pension system and make it more funded without changing the funded status of the general employee system. So, the general employee system would still say sufficiently funded for all these obligations, but we’d use all the excess that we could to clean up the funded ratio of the police and fire.”