CLEVELAND -- A newly formed group believes that Cleveland City Council has too many members, and the effort to reduce that number of elected representatives is now picking up steam, reported 5 On Your Side government specialist Tony Gaskins.

There are currently 21 council members serving Cleveland's population of 480,000, which is too many for too few, according to Pete Kirsanow, of the newly formed Ohio Citizens League.

"We're currently wildly out of proportion with respect to the size of city councils of similarly situated cities, such as Seattle, Boston, Columbus and Cincinnati," said Kirsanow.

The Citizens League wants to cut the number of council members from 21 to 11, and has gathered 24,000 signatures to place such a charter amendment on the 2006 primary ballot.

Councilman Zach Reed calls the plan ridiculous.

"We have a hard and difficult job, and we're out there doing the job every single day, so to make accusations that we're not effective that we're not efficient just proves to me they're out of step and don't know what's going on," said Reed.

Kirsonow compares Cleveland with Columbus, which has seven council members for a population of 700,000.

And Houston has nine council members for 2 million people.

"We think that if you've got too many councilmen, you've got a tendency to have a more narrow parochial concern and it's not necessarily an interest on the part of the councilman to advance the general interests of the city," said Kirsonow.

The Citizens League insists the charter amendment has nothing to do with saving taxpayer dollars, but makes government more effective.

But at least one council member says, if it's not broke don't fix it.