Amy Sangiolo’s email newsletter provides the relevant links to the latest charter revisions debate.
The City Council’s agenda for it’s Full Council Meeting includes a request for Home Rule Legislation to amend the City’s Charter to include 2019 recommendations by the Charter Subcommittee except for those related to composition and term limits for the City Council and Mayor. Last week, the Administration sent out this memo to the City Council stating that the Mayor would veto the request should the City Council keep a provision granting authority for the City Council to hire it’s own legal counsel under certain circumstances. In response, the Chair of the Charter subcommittee has forwarded this memo to the City Council informing them of his decision to offer to remove that provision from the Charter amendment recommendations and once that vote has been taken, to offer the Charter Subcommittee recommendations for a full vote of the Council. A memo from the Chair of the Programs and Services Committee detailing the changes can be found here.
Here is a MSWord revision compare of the proposed charter against the current charter:
http://newtonwatch.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/ProposedCharterRevisions6May2019.pdf
The proposal contains well over 1500 edits. While the law department has reviewed the items with updated language, they have cautioned about risk of unintended consequences.
It is hard to distill which of these numerous edits constitute substantive changes vs. wordsmithing/”updating”.
One item added is a provision to begin reimbursing councilors for expenses via ordinance. What might that include? For example, many councilors spend money from their political campaigns to attend various civic breakfasts and events. Might some of those now become reimbursed by taxpayers?
Elimination of special elections for petition items could have unintended consequences. What if city needed to act quickly on something like opt-out where delay to next major election was an imposition on businesses, legal risk, or made moot by delay?
I would think that having this charter in flux through the state house approval would also suspend activity around consideration of changing the council to an 8-8 composition?
Ultimately, I think the council needs to decide if the positive changes proposed merit the costs, process, and risks of the update.
I would add though that the subcommittee did significant and admirable work reviewing and discussing the commission’s proposal section by section over many months.
The sub-committee’s revised proposal has filtered out several unnecessary and/or controversial items from the original commission proposal (including changes to area councils), so it is likely fine to advance. I just wanted to highlight the potential issues.
Home rule legislation was meant to consider single items.
This attempt by the Charter subcommittee is not appropriate.
For multiple and significant changes to the Charter the electorate
must be asked to vote. How is the State legislature supposed to vote on such an array of complex issues? They know little about
this intrigues of Newton politics.
The charter isn’t supposed to address the intrigues of Newton politics. Its main purpose is to establish the structure of the city government by delineating the roles, responsibilities, and powers of the mayor, city council, and school committee, no matter who is in office or what the prevailing issues of the moment may be. It should be a document that’s as valid in 2039 as it is in 2019, with the proviso that changes in state law prevail over a municipal charter.
Last night, by a vote of 22-0 (with two absent), the City Council passed the updated recommendation of the Programs and Services Committee for updates to Newton’s Charter, building on the work of the former Charter Commission. (Council composition and term limits were deferred, and Area Councils were unchanged.) Included, after a motion to remove them failed 22-0, were provisions recommended by the former Charter Commission to set aside 2 per cent of the Law Department budget (roughly $40,000) beginning in fiscal 2021 for the rare case when the Council might want to secure legal advice in addition to the Law Department.
The updated Charter now goes to the Mayor for her signature, and if she concurs, to the General Court and then the Governor for action as a Home Rule Petition asking for special legislation to amend Newton’s Charter as proposed. (A Home Rule Petition is how the City Council changed its name from the Board of Aldermen several years ago.)
My thanks to our City staff, as well as Councilors and citizens, some of whom did not support the earlier 2017 Charter Commission recommendations, who worked collaboratively to enable the Council to reach the result it did last night.
– Councilor Lisle Baker, Chair, Charter Sub-committee, Newton City Council.