The long road to charter review
The other day, I had a conversation with a resident who started to ask me about Medford's charter. "You know, I think the mayor should have four years," he said (the mayor, school committee, and city council each have two-year terms). But he was having doubts about whether the city council should switch from its current at-large system to ward-based or a mix of the two. "You'd think that a ward-based council would lead to cronyism?" he asked. I liked talking to him. People are sometimes extremely assertive in their viewpoints and leave very little room for conversation, but he brought up his thoughts in a way that indicated he was looking for a discussion. I did personally disagree with this view on ward-based representation (more on that later), but it was a great back-and-forth.
The first time I learned about Medford's charter was when the city council voted against reviewing it in March 2022, in a split between the four progressives that wanted to review it and the three longer-term members that did not (the state requires at least 5-2). Medford's charter is its governing document, and "reviewing" it just means examining it to recommend changes — this could mean doing nothing and it could mean overhauling the whole thing. The vote had been brought to the fore by the Medford Charter Review Coalition (MCRC), a citizen advocacy group with a self-explanatory name. Following the vote, the leader of the MCRC put out an open call on Facebook to anyone who would like to join it. I attended the first meeting, and I kept attending meetings.
Medford's charter hasn't been updated since the 1980s. Every municipality in Massachusetts has a charter, with the origins of some of them dating back to pre-Revolutionary times. The charter decides the composition of the city council, school committee, and mayor/city manager, the powers of each, term limits, budgetary authorities, et cetera. The charter can be a dry topic of discussion, but it's also one of the most important for Medford’s future. Issues with a city's charter tend to show up long-term, over several different election cycles, since it takes a few data points to establish whether a given city’s dysfunction is systemic or just due to one administration. For instance, weak mayor systems of government, in which a mayor can't directly remove or appoint officials, were popular in the 1980s but fell out of favor when this led to too much infighting in too many cities.
The MCRC had attempted to get the city council to amend the charter in one way: the city council votes on a charter review, and these changes are then put on the ballot. This had failed with the 4-3 vote, so they tried another way: signatures. The MCRC arranged to collect signatures from the voting residents of Medford. If they could collect signatures from 15% of registered voters, the city council didn't need to be involved. (When I was involved in the MCRC, my job was to create promotional materials — I redesigned the brochures and the now-defunct website.)
The signature collection plan was remarkably difficult for a few reasons. First, Medford officially has 41,417 registered voters (candidates receive a list when they return papers), so 15% of those means that 6,213 are required to get anything on the ballot. I don't think the official list maintained by the city is completely accurate, since 15,060 voters are inactive, and the active ones include two former roommates of mine that moved out years ago (to be fair, it's very difficult to keep these lists up to date). But 6,213 is the official number. The MCRC had about 2500 signatures when I joined, though these were mainly from a former member who had been sinking a lot of time into it. I personally undertook an initiative at the MCRC that tried to make this easier by mailing out copies of signature sheets to interested residents, along with return envelopes. I mailed out over 50 sheets and received back nine. Efforts to physically collect signatures at outdoor events were similarly painful. We learned quickly that taking on an initiative like that without full-time canvassers is infeasible.
Luckily, the publicity stirred up by this got the Mayor to institute a new body: the Medford Charter Study Committee (MCSC). The idea of this would basically be to go back to plan A — ask the city council to vote on it — but with a thoroughly researched plan that included expert and public feedback. The 11-member MCSC contained four members of the MCRC, including myself and the leader of the coalition. We began to have monthly meetings, including with representatives from the Collins Center, a government advisory center out of UMass Boston that regularly consults with cities on charter review.
These meetings were the first time that we really delved into the charter itself. Medford's charter is a mess, and it's incomplete. A layperson reading it wouldn't know how the city government works; in many areas, it simply defaults to Massachusetts state law. So, to understand how Medford works, one would need to be an expert in Massachusetts state law. One of the most basic functions of charter review is to produce a document that describes fully how the city works.
What else can it affect? As reported on in the Medford, MA subreddit, the MCSC (which I stepped down from after I began to campaign) released the results of an ongoing public survey (feel free to fill it out), indicating which areas different residents preferred. Quoting directly from this post:
What form of government would be best for Medford moving forward?
Mayor: 69%, City Manager, 14%, Not sure, 16%
What should term length be for mayor?
Four years, 68%, 23% 2 years, many other responses with <5%
Should Medford's City Council change so that some councilors represent the entire city (at large) and others represent particular neighborhoods or wards?
Ward and at-large 64%, All ward represented 17%, Stay as-is 15%
Should Medford's School Committee change so that some councilors represent the entire city (at large) and others represent particular neighborhoods or wards?
49% Ward and at-large, 18% All Ward represented, 25% stay as is
Should the term length for City Councilors be longer than two years?
52% No, 33% Yes, 14% Not Sure
Should the term length for School Committee members be longer than two years?
52% No, 30% Yes, 15% Not Sure
Should the mayor be the chairperson of the school committee?
60% No, 20% Yes, 16% Not Sure
Should the mayor be a member of the school committee?
43% No, 37% Yes, 15% Not Sure
Should there be a limit on terms a mayor can serve?
70% Yes, 20% No, 10% Not Sure
Should there be a limit on terms a city councilor can serve?
64% Yes, 27% No 9% Not Sure
Should there be a limit on terms a school committee member can serve?
65% Yes, 25% No, 10% Not Sure
There was a question to rank 12 issues in order of importance, which was hard to interpret and hard to "score," but the #1 issue was Mayor vs. city manager and #2 was City Council Ward representation.
Anyone who thinks about charter review habitually has a strong opinion about some specific aspect of it. Personally, I think about city council composition. The lack of ward representation in Medford is one area that, I believe, is not a benefit to the city. It makes the city council homogenous and has historically focused resources in an imbalanced way. Medford's wards have very different populations, so having city councilors from specific wards would help with diversity. Another council candidate I spoke with cared just as much about the school committee being ward-based, with the reasoning being that most working parents don't have as much time to campaign and ward-based campaigns are less time-consuming.
That being said — if I were elected and the MCSC recommended some change that I personally disagreed with, what would I do? In all likelihood, I'd side with the MCSC. This is partially because I worked with them and trust them to do their jobs. It's also because I've seen city councilors in the past reject expert advice and public feedback and call it independent thinking (if I were to write a paper on a topic like chemistry or medieval Iranian art or number theory, it would full of independent thinking — it just wouldn't be terribly good or even based in reality). The decisions of elected leaders need to be made when listening to a combination of expert advice and public feedback.
