Ruth Balser breaks the news on Facebook
It's official! The Governor signed Newton's home rule petition changing the name of the Board of Aldermen to City…
Posted by Ruth B. Balser on Monday, September 28, 2015
Crazy Divers: Men be like...
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Great to hear.
It’s a bit remarkable how long it took to dot all the Is and cross the all the Ts at the state level once it left the local government in Newton. One of the points of heated debate as far back as (and I believe farther back than) the 1917/1918 Massachusetts Constitutional Convention was about how local petitions concerning relatively small municipal/home-rule matters like this were such a slog to get through the Massachusetts legislature and probably didn’t really require that level of oversight. The heated debate was less about the volume, though, and more about what to do about it. One of the controversial (and ultimately unsuccessful) proposals was to offload home rule petitions onto the Governor’s Council, since it’s already there as a small, elected body representing the entire state but didn’t have much business at the time to attend to. Later, the legislature did end up putting some of its minor responsibilities off onto the Governor’s Council as had been proposed in the convention, but the corruption raids of the 1960s forced the legislature in 1964 hastily to rescind/repeal all statutory and delegated (non-constitutional) roles from the Council. The 51-year-long timeout for the Council continues. And yet it continues to exist in near-limbo.
Meanwhile, the process for minor tweaks takes forever because the legislature is busy with many other (and bigger) things. Perhaps the Constitutional Convention delegates 97 or so years ago who proposed giving the Council more of these little tasks, like checking and approving home rule petitions to change the name alderman to councilor, were onto something…
@Bill Humphrey,
Nice bit of historical perspective there! Thank you. 🙂
You’re quite welcome! If you’re interested, I actually just finished a post about that same convention’s frequent discussions of the Russian Revolution, which really does tend to put a timestamp on those deliberations on revising the form of government in Massachusetts: http://arsenalfordemocracy.com/2015/09/28/the-russian-revolution-the-1918-massachusetts-convention/
Thank you again, Bill! I will definitely check this out. This looks far more interesting than the legislative reporter’s notes I’m used to reading following