The Politics of Charter Review
Today, I’m going to talk about a very wonky topic that I’ve written about twice before: the Charter! This is a long post, but context is important when explaining the tug-of-war of local politics.
Others have written about the advantages and disadvantages of different policy proposals in Medford's Charter. I’ll summarize my views on a few policies, but that’s not really what this post is about. It’s more of a review of process, politics, conflicts of interest, and power struggles. The Charter Review process in Medford has recently gotten a bit bogged down in disagreements between the Mayor and City Council, and I’ve been getting more and more questions about what’s been going on, so I’ll offer my perspective. If all of that sounds like your jam, read on.
The Nuts and Bolts of Charters
The Charter is to Medford what the Constitution is to the United States: the governing document that establishes the basic system of government, the elected bodies, and balances of power between them. Our current Charter establishes that we have a Mayor, seven at-large City Councilors, and six at-large School Committee Members, with the Mayor as chair of the School Committee. Under Massachusetts General Law, we have a Plan A government, or a “Strong Mayor” system.
There are two ways to amend the charter. One way — which is what we’re in the middle of right now — is the Special Act process. This is where the City Council (as a body) and the Mayor agree on a Charter amendment, then send it to the State House. In theory, the State House can just pass this version of the Charter on their own. In practice, the State House, after giving a provisional approval of the draft, sends it back to the City and requires a non-binding ballot initiative, in which the voters vote on the new Charter. If it passes at the ballot box, the State House officially passes it.
Another means of amending a Charter is the Home Rule process, which can be initiated by collecting signatures from 15% of registered voters in a given municipality. The Mayor, with a two-thirds vote of the City Council, can also petition the State to allow them to initiate the Home Rule Charter process directly, thereby skipping signature collection. Once it’s initiated, nine members of a Charter Review Commission are elected directly by the voters of that municipality. The commission holds public hearings, drafts a new Charter, and sends that draft to the voters. If it passes at the ballot box, that municipality has a new Home Rule Charter. Medford is not doing that, though we have attempted to initiate the process twice in the recent past.
That’s all a little confusing, so here’s a chart:
Note: the Attorney General still gets to review Home Rule Charter drafts. So Home Rule Charters can implement policies that the State House may not favor, but they can’t do anything explicitly against Massachusetts General Law.
In practice, Home Rule Charters have two advantages: first, they bypass the conflicts inherent in elected officials fighting over their own powers. Second, because they bypass review by the State House and are approved directly by the voters, they allow the municipality to have much more leeway in the policies they actually implement. If a policy isn’t explicitly against Massachusetts General Law, it can be written into a Home Rule Charter. Special Act Charters tend to disfavor out-of-the-box ideas, because the State House doesn’t really like out-of-the-box ideas. The best example of this is ranked-choice voting, which was a Massachusetts ballot initiative in 2020. It was voted down statewide, but Medford favored it 16871 to 13442 (page 15). In theory, a charter that is truly representative of what Medford residents want would have ranked-choice voting; in practice, if the Mayor and City Council approved a Charter with ranked-choice voting, the State House would send it back and tell us to try again. The municipalities that have ranked-choice voting have done so via the Home Rule process.
The drawback of Home Rule Charters is that they’re very difficult to initiate. Medford tried to collect the signatures for this years ago and didn’t get there. I was involved in this effort myself later on, before I was elected to Council. City Council passed a Home Rule Petition in 2022, but it wasn’t sent to the state (the vote was 4-3 and it required at least two-thirds support from Council). And, even when the Home Rule Commission is elected and puts up their own Charter draft, that process can get just as messy. My favorite example to read about is Newton, a City that, for some godforsaken reason, has 24 City Councilors. They had a Home Rule Commission back in 2017 that proposed to cut that number to 12, but it saw local opposition and failed because the proposed Charter would have had all of those be elected at-large.
The Special Act process is easier to initiate, but it requires the approval of local elected officials. In my eyes, this is only the second-best process. Elected officials are the least-worst people to do this because we’re the only ones who were elected directly by voters. So, in the absence of an elected Home Rule Commission, we have the City Council and Mayor. But, us elected officials are making long-term decisions about our own positions and powers, and we tend to have very strong and differing opinions about that. Amendments to the Constitution have a similar system: they need to go through Congress and be ratified by two-thirds of state legislatures, even though the Constitution is intimately tied to the balance of powers between those elected officials. But the system is set up so that only groups of people elected by voters can change it; the President, being one person, can’t simply amend the constitution on their own.
The current process in Medford
Following the failure of signature collection efforts and Council’s proposed Home Rule Petition, the Mayor, in 2022, appointed a Charter Study Committee, with 11 people (I was one of the original appointees and, after I was asked to step down after announcing my campaign for City Council, was very supportive of this effort). This Committee has no explicit authority under Mass General Law, but they were charged by the Mayor with coming up with a draft of the Charter, with the help of the Collins Center at UMass Boston. The Committee spent two years drafting a charter, collecting public feedback, and meeting with the Collins Center. In December 2024, they submitted their Charter draft to the Mayor, who edited it further before sending it to City Council on December 16th. City Council edited it further, and we submitted our edits to the Mayor, on March 11th, approving the overall charter with a 6-0 vote (with one Councilor absent). On April 1st, the Mayor sent out a press release stating that she was returning a draft to City Council, with the heavy implication that Council needed to approve that draft by the following meeting on April 8th, in order to meet the state house’s deadlines to get it on the November 2025 ballot. City Council then voted on further changes to this draft and delayed the final vote to a special meeting the next week, on April 15th, which is what we’ll be voting on this coming Tuesday. The Mayor then sent out a second press release indicating that she would not accept the changes voted on on the April 8th meeting (the decision to remove the Mayor from School Committee).
Different, very important, redline edits were made in each draft, but the major changes that the Mayor and City Council have been disagreeing on in this back-and-forth is the composition of the City Council and School Committee.
It’s confusing, so I put it in a table:
| Current Charter | Mayor/Charter Study Committee Original Draft | City Council Approved Draft | Mayor returned draft | City Council tentatively approved and sent to special meeting | Special meeting | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| December 16th, 2024 | March 11th, 2025 | April 1st, 2025 | April 8th, 2025 | April 15th, 2025 | ||
| City Council | 7 at-large | 3 at-large, 8 ward | 5 at-large, 4 district | 3 at-large, 8 ward | 3 at-large, 8 ward | TBD |
| School Committee | 6 at-large, Mayor as chair | 2 at-large, 4 district, Mayor as chair | 2 at-large, 4 district, Mayor as voting member (not chair) | 2 at-large, 4 district, Mayor as voting member (not chair) | 3 at-large, 4 district (Mayor is not on School Committee) |
TBD |
Speaking for myself, as one Councilor: I’ve had to sit through hours of policy discussion on the ward-versus-district issue. Medford has eight wards, but these can be combined into four districts. I supported three at-large, eight ward during my campaign, but I think that a five at-large, four district-based City Council is a slightly better system that effectively achieves the goals of three at-large, eight ward. My colleague wrote a much more eloquent argument in favor of it than I’ll do in this post. But I also recognize that three at-large, eight ward is the most intuitive and widely popular system, so I was fine with the April 8th edits.
Consistent with taking up the more-popular approach, I don’t think the Mayor should be on School Committee, mainly because (1) the Charter Study Committee’s own survey, though it came from a skewed sample, said that 43% of respondents disfavored keeping the Mayor on School Committee while only 35% favored it (page 147), and that survey was used to justify many other decisions in their final report; (2) while current and former School Committee members differ in their views on this, I’ve had some tell me how conflicts of interest arise when the Mayor’s sitting in on union contract negotiations — the Mayor’s thinking about the budget as a whole and School Committee members have told me that they want to be in a better position to advocate for the needs of the schools without this influence; (3) there needs to be a stronger balance of power between the Mayor, the Council, and the School Committee, and the current charter gives the Mayor far too much power relative to the other two bodies; and (4) while it’s the trend to have the Mayor chair School Committees in Massachusetts because that’s the default setup under Mass General Law, this isn’t the case nationally. There are plenty of arguments for and against this policy, but those are the ones that stuck with me.
Speaking about the back-and-forth of the Mayor-on-School Committee issue: I never thought it was good policy to have the Mayor on from the getgo, but two of my colleagues on Council were involved in behind-the-scenes talks with the Mayor regarding what she would accept, and the edits that were approved on March 11th were made with what I thought were careful consideration for what the Mayor would accept overall. I wasn’t privy to all of those conversations, so I can’t intelligently comment on what happened. I can say that I was blindsided by the April 1st press release that rejected many of our first round of edits, and at that point, after a colleague motioned for it, I just voted on what I thought was the better policy.
The Charter Study Committee
I’ll talk a bit about Medford’s Charter Study Committee and try to shed some light on my thoughts on it and how those thoughts have evolved over time.
The Charter Study Committee was formed at a time when almost half the Council had voted against Charter Review, and even those members that were in favor had significant disagreements with the Mayor over budgetary matters that year. I think this is at least partially why the Mayor decided to appoint them without Council confirmation. For essentially the whole lifetime of the Study Committee, Council as a body — even though we would eventually have to approve it — was not a part of the process, though current and former elected officials were interviewed as individuals early on. I was one of the original appointees, and I was asked to step down after I announced my campaign for City Council. During my campaign, in their early days, I pledged wholeheartedly to support their work. This was, in part, to bolster public confidence in a body that had been appointed by one person, and partially because I did have more faith in the process until very recently.
(Note: Officially, the Charter Study Committee, as a body, disbanded after they submitted their draft to the Mayor in December 2024, but a few individual members have since been involved in efforts to lobby City Council to accept the draft that the Mayor edited. I don’t think of the Study Committee as a monolith — I know most of the individuals on it, and between them there are significant disagreements on different aspects of the Charter and the current process. That’s natural. And people have rotated on and off it. But I’m referring to the Study Committee as a body for the sake of simplicity.)
Being on the Study Committee was very different from seeing their work after I was elected to Council. A few members departed and were replaced around the time I stepped off. Council (as a body) was never included in the drafting process, though individuals were interviewed in late 2023 and early 2024. Even after a new Council that was much friendlier to the idea of charter review was elected in 2024, Council was not involved, even though the Council President specifically requested this from the Mayor. The Charter Study Committee’s meeting minutes show that a City liaison that reports directly to the Mayor was present at just under half (21 of 43) of their meetings. The first time Council got to see their completed work was on December 16th, 2024, after the Mayor made her own edits, with the expectation that we finish ours three months later. This is very little time, in legislative terms, to finish editing a document like the Charter. But, on March 11th, we submitted our edits.
To contextualize all of this: excluding the municipal legislative body from drafting of the Charter to this extent is highly unusual (except in the Home Rule process, which is a different thing entirely). Again, under Massachusetts General Law, the requirement is that the Mayor and the City Council approve a draft that is sent to the State House. But Medford’s Charter Study Committee was appointed by a single person without the involvement of any other elected body. I looked at Charter Review Committees of just under 50 cities and towns in Massachusetts — working particularly hard to find those of other cities, with whom Medford is more comparable — and could find no other municipality that did that. From what I could find, the most common model is to have members nominated by the Mayor and confirmed by the City Council (or Council equivalent — Town Meeting, etc.). Middleton and Natick did have smaller Charter Review Committees appointed by a Town Moderator, which is the closest I could find to Medford’s situation, though the Moderator, by design, has a much closer working relationship with the legislative body. Southbridge had them solely appointed by a Town Council President, though that’s a position voted on by the legislative body itself. In Westfield, Watertown, Taunton, Pittsfield, Peabody, Northampton, Winthrop, and Randolph, Councilors (or their equivalents) are themselves members of the Charter Review Committee, and Reading, Scituate, and Somerville have both Councilors and School Committee members on theirs. In the cases where elected officials are explicitly excluded from the committee (a frequent feature of Home Rule Charters), the City Council typically appoints the Charter Review Committee themselves.
In short — from what I could find, Medford is the only city that had a Charter Review Committee equivalent appointed entirely by a single independently elected official without involvement from the legislative body.
I wasn’t too critical of this process before because I was understanding of why these decisions were made at the time, and, frankly, I want to see a new Charter pass. Again, when the Study Committee was appointed, almost half of Council voted down Charter Review, and advocates really wanted to see it happen. So, in my view, this situation would have been fine if Council had simply been handed the Charter Study Committee’s draft, offered our own edits, had a conversation with the Mayor to find out what was acceptable to both parties, and sent it all happily to the State House.
Of course, that’s not how it’s been unfolding. Many of the substantive edits from our first round were rejected. Our second round, even before we passed it, was met with a second press release urging us to keep the Mayor on School Committee. Since December, there’s been a continuous flow of Reddit posts from the chair of the Charter Study Committee, which generally argued for the Charter Study Committee’s original recommendations, urging the public to urge the City Council to accept all of them. One member of the Charter Study Committee put out a death wish against the City Council President in a now-deleted Facebook post, while another showed up to multiple Council meetings on the topic to lambast us whenever we debated making changes to major policy points. And I can understand their frustrations. The Mayor and those members of the Study Committee are good people who’ve been working hard on a product for years, and they don’t like to see it changed. But, the fact is that Council, under Massachusetts General Law, has to agree on it, and that’s always been the case. With that in mind, this isn’t what a functional process looks like.
The People’s Charter
Nobody working on this project is above politics. I’m not, the rest of City Council is not, the School Committee is not, the Mayor is not, the public is not, and the Charter Study Committee is not. Period. I am an elected official, and this blog post isn't coming from an unbiased source. Anybody trying to tell you that they are a disinterested person, above the influences of politics, is either disingenuous or lying to themselves. Everyone in this process is trying to do what they think is best for the future of the City, and reasonable people disagree on what that may be and the means of getting there.
I say this, first, because it’s a pet peeve: I’ve had to sit through my share of right-wing extremists and bad-faith actors in Council Chambers claim that they represent the true will of the people, rather than an elected legislative body. And, second, I’ve heard a recurring notion in public discourse that the Charter Study Committee somehow crafted a Charter that is representative of the will of the people, without consideration for politics. That’s untrue. For one thing, the Mayor is exercising far more influence in this process than Council ever could, so there’s a bias in that direction. More importantly, though, it just would have been logistically impossible to accomplish a truly representative Charter — I think members of the Study Committee earnestly tried, but they never had the resources to achieve that. The Charter Study Committee was not demographically or ideologically representative of the City, since the Mayor could only appoint people from the very limited pool who applied. The people who applied are community members who are already deeply involved in city affairs, and that’s a very skewed group. And, after they were appointed, they never had the resources to properly craft a poll and get a non-skewed population to survey on particular policy points. They spent a lot of time and effort conducting a survey whose respondents were 81.8 percent homeowners (page 4), even though renters comprise about half the city — and this is a very common trend for municipal surveys. The one policy item we do have a real poll on (ranked-choice voting) wouldn’t have even been accepted by the state house if the Charter Study Committee had recommended it. They did their best with what they had, and this Charter is an imperfect product of that imperfect process, which is now being edited by imperfect elected officials, who are still being lobbied by a few members of that imperfect Study Committee.
How do we get the true People’s Charter? Elect a Home Rule Commission and give them the funding to hire professional pollsters, who would have the resources to get a truly unbiased idea of what the general public wants. But, we don’t have that, so we’re doing the best with what we have.
Where we’re at now
In summary, I’ve had growing reservations about this process for several months, but the full consequences of that have only flowered very recently. Nobody’s the bad guy here, but, yes, this does represent a slight breakdown in communications. I’m writing this post to offer some insight surrounding what’s been happening from my perspective, since, with the two recent press releases, that breakdown is now very public, and I’ve been getting questions about it. The committee was appointed by one elected official, Council never received updates or presentations from that body while the process was happening, a liaison who worked for the Mayor was present at half of the Study Committee’s meetings, the Mayor edited the Study Committee’s draft after they submitted it, and Council was given an artificially short timeline to come to a consensus on our own edits. And I would have been fine with all of that if our March 11th edits, which were passed unanimously (albeit with one absence) had been accepted and sent to the state house. But, that’s not how it unfolded.
So — I am uncomfortable that communication between the Council and the Mayor is being done via press release, I am uncomfortable that important decisions are being made on an artificially rushed timeline, and I am uncomfortable that a process that Mass General Law says needs consensus between the Mayor and City Council was designed to be uniquely uncollaborative between the two bodies. Charter Reviews often fail or reach gridlock when they’re conducted more skillfully than this. I want a new charter, but I’m also not seeing why the few major policy decisions that Council got behind ought to be changed.
Anyway, more updates ahead as we’ll be voting on the final version of this on Tuesday.
