Thoughts on Article VIII of the Charter Draft
I last wrote about the city’s charter during my campaign. Medford’s charter is its governing document, which dictates things like the makeup of City Council and School Committee, whether we have a strong or weak mayoral system, and so on. The main difference between city ordinances and the charter is that the charter overrules state law, and so it’s a lot more difficult to change. Back in 2023, the Mayor appointed a body of 11 residents to draft recommendations on a new charter, along with experts from the Collins Center. I was on this body for several months, but I stepped down when I started my City Council campaign. The Charter Study Committee submitted their recommendations late last year, along with a longer report. The City Council then gets to edit the charter before it’s sent to the state house, voted on in a general election, and sent to the state house again. There are ten articles to this charter draft. I'll be using this post to explain and offer my thoughts on Article VIII - "Citizen Participation Mechanisms".
Citizen Participation mechanisms mainly offers procedures for how residents can put items up for a public vote without the permission of elected officials and recall elected officials. A lot of the current draft concerns petitions for various types of initiatives and the amount of signatures required for each. For instance, placing a measure on the ballot that City Council or School Committee disagrees with requires signatures from ten percent of registered voters.
Article VIII is laid out in eight sections (see page 25). I'll offer a layman's description of what each section says here. I'll also offer exact signature counts in each place where percentages are specified, assuming that Medford has 44,100 registered voters, which was the count in November 2024. Another important piece to look at when reading Article VIII is Section 1-7 (see page 2), which specifies that “voters” refers to the total number of registered voters (this threw me for a loop initially when I thought it referred to the 13,371 count from the last municipal election); “referendum measure” refers to a measure adopted by the city council or the school committee that is protested under the charter’s referendum procedures in Section 8-3; and “Initiative measure” refers to a measure proposed by the voters through the charter’s initiative process in Section 8-2.
Layman’s description of Article VIII
8-1 - Free petitions — If anybody collects 25 signatures about any issue they like, City Council or School Committee has to hold a hearing on it.
8-2 - Citizen Initiative Measures — A citizen collects 250 signatures to present a petition about a potential change they would like to see, and, if the city solicitor deems it legal, they have three months to collect signatures from five percent of voters (2,205 signatures) and force the City Council or School Committee to vote on that issue. If either body rejects this, they have two months to collect an additional five percent (so, 4,410 total), and the initiative gets placed on the ballot, to be voted on in a special election.
8-3 - Citizen Referendum Procedures — If the City Council or School Committee passes something and someone wants to repeal it, a citizen has three weeks to collect signatures from 12 percent of voters (5,292 signatures), which puts it up for a special election.
8-4 - Ineligible Measures — This disallows referenda and initiatives for a number of topics. Citizen-led petitions cannot change the composition of the City Council or School Committee, change emergency measures outlined in the charter, change the budget, affect payment of the city's debts, appropriate funds for collective bargaining, repeal or rescind measures protested by referendum procedures, pertain to routine or frivolous matters, or set property/water or sewer tax rates.
8-5 - Recall - If 500 signatures are collected for the Mayor or at-large Council members or 300 for any other position, a citizen has 40 days to collect signatures from 20 percent of voters (8,820 signatures for at-large positions, an average of 1,103 signatures for a Ward position, and an average of 2,206 for the proposed districts) to place a recall petition for an elected official on the ballot of the next special election. Recalls cannot take place six months before or after an election.
8-6 - Required voter participation - 20 percent of registered voters (8,820 people for at-large positions) need to participate in an election for an initiative/referendum to be valid, and 25 percent (11,025) need to participate for a recall to be valid.
8-7 - Submission of other matters to voters - The City Council can vote to put any of these matters on the ballot and skip the signature collection process.
8-8 - Conflicting provisions - If two ballot measures contradict each other, the one with the greater number of votes wins.
My two cents
I passed a letter to the governance committee (of which I'm not a member, but I will be voting on these changes as a whole) recommending that section 8-1 (free petitions) and 8-5 (recalls) be removed entirely. Am I dead set against keeping these? Not necessarily, but I’d need my concerns resolved first. I will outline those concerns below.
8-1 can easily be abused without offering any concrete benefit over what we have now. 25 signatures is an extremely low threshold to put something on a Council or School Committee agenda. Right now, anyone can already say anything they like at the public participation section of a City Council meeting, and citizens have used the public comment period to do just that.
A lot of Article VIII is in place to account for inadequate elected officials, and I think one reason this was put on there is because, historically, advocates had difficulty getting any Councilor to respond to them. I just don’t see how 8-1 offers any improvement over open public comment because Councilors and School Committee members don’t have to do anything during a hearing on the agenda any more than they have to reply to public comment (the procedures in 8-2, however, would force a vote). It just allows a situation where one person can file dozens of petitions with 25 signatures, without even requiring them to show up to the meeting.
My criticism of 8-5 is more nuanced. The research of the Charter Study Committee on instances where recalls were attempted presents some interesting case studies, and I think the intention of a recall is to account for the extreme instances where an elected official broke the law, commited fraud, et cetera. One of the case studies was a constitutional crisis in Fall River, where the Mayor was indicted for investor fraud and refused to step down (he was later arrested and served six years in federal prison); in another instance, citizens in North Brookfield tried to gather enough signatures to recall two selectmen for allowing a Pride event to take place. So there can be legitimate reasons for a recall, and the system can be abused.
Two-year terms are so short that the “recall” is essentially just a regular election period, though a four-year term might justify recall provisions. A frequent criticism of two-year terms is that electeds are campaigning more than they’re governing, and this risks extending the campaign season even further. As it says on page 17 of the Charter Study Committee’s final report, I think this was added in there to target the mayor, whose term would be extended from two to four years under the Charter Study Committee’s recommendations. Three of the four public comments that the CSC collected regarding Article VIII disfavored recalls, with the one comment in favor seeming to have the mayor in mind.
But, as the Charter is written, it’s not just for the mayor — it’s for any elected official, and the current draft of the charter leaves in two-year terms for everyone else.
Even if removal from office is an unlikely outcome, I think that even the threat of a recall can be a tactic used by a vocal minority to change the behavior of an elected official; early in my term, this happened to me — by a New Hampshire resident, no less, who wasn’t aware that Medford doesn’t yet have provisions for recalls. This situation will be doubly true for ward/district councilors and school committee members. Collecting the signatures for their recall is much more feasible than for at-large positions. 20 percent of registered voters, or 8,820 signatures, would be almost impossible to collect without a concerted, organized effort (the state requires signatures from only 15 percent of registered voters to initiate a home-rule charter process in the first place, and I can tell you from personal experience that collecting those 6,615 signatures is not easy without full-time workers). 1,102 signatures, which is the average requirement for Ward positions, is nowhere near as difficult, and a few committed residents who don’t like a particular development in their backyard could get that on the ballot.
I’m also nervous about the implications of Section 8-7, which states that the City Council can put a recall on the ballot by a simple majority vote, bypassing the entire signature collection process. First, the relationship between the Mayor and City Council has always been contentious in Medford, and threats of a recall ballot wouldn’t help that. Second, in an at-large voting system, while you wouldn’t need a majority of ballots cast to get a seat on City Council or School Committee, you would need a majority to keep your seat in a recall (four of the seven current Councilors, including myself, did not receive votes from a majority of ballots cast in this past election — we just received more than everyone else). This presents a situation where a single Councilor or School Committee member, unpopular with their colleagues, could be put up for a recall on a pretense; if this were an at-large position, keeping a seat in a recall might be more difficult than obtaining it in the first place. EDIT: This was wrong. Under the draft, the Council cannot place a recall on the ballot, only a measure.
Beyond that — 8-2 and 8-3 seem OK, though the difficulty in collecting that many signatures really can’t be underestimated. I collected 90 signatures in about a week to get myself on the ballot. It’s not that hard if you have time to knock doors in the evenings. Congress requires 2,000 signatures to get on the ballot. There was a concerted effort to primary Katherine Clark this past election, and that campaign had a lot of energy, but the advocates behind that couldn’t get 2,000 signatures in the whole Congressional district. If my reading of 8-3 is correct, petitioners would have three weeks to collect 5,292 signatures to potentially undo an action of City Council or School Committee, which would require probably between 15-20 canvassers going out every evening for three weeks to collect 300 signatures apiece. Anyone with that sort of energy and political savvy should probably be putting their time into running for office and unseating those they disagreed with in the first place. The signature requirements and timeframes specified in 8-2 seem more likely to be utilized in the future.
