This past holiday season there was more than mistletoe on the minds of Harvard citizens. There was talk of charters, and this time it wasn’t about the town’s cable provider.
In late December Worth Robbins (a co-owner of the Harvard Press) launched a citizen petition campaign calling for the creation of a nine-member charter commission to study and recommend changes to Harvard’s town government. As of Wednesday afternoon, Jan. 6, proponents had collected 94 percent of the 626 signatures the state requires to place the question before voters at this spring’s Town Election.
Meanwhile, the chairman of a working group assembled by Town Administrator Tim Bragan to investigate the range of state-sanctioned procedures for making such changes—which include the writing of a town charter—said his group will have completed its own study of the matter in time for Bragan to deliver a report to the selectmen on Jan. 26. But Bob Eubank, the groups’s chairman, said he thought the group’s work had been mischaracterized as “closed” by charter commission advocates.
Shall a commission be elected?
The question that petition signers want placed on the April 12 Town Election ballot is: “Shall a Charter Commission be elected to frame a charter for the Town of Harvard?”
Proponents have been collecting the names of registered voters at the town Transfer Station, the General Store, and from friends and neighbors since Dec. 21, when Robbins announced the campaign on Nextdoor Harvard.
To date, Robbins said this week, 589 registered Harvard voters have signed one of the 37 petition forms circulating in town. Of those, 349 have been certified, Town Clerk Janet Vellante told the Press on Wednesday, her work on the annual town census having delayed her review of all the forms submitted so far. Robbins says proponents will continue to collect signatures until they have reached a total of 650. “I’m confident we’ll reach our goal,” Robbins said Wednesday. But whether the question makes it to this year’s ballot depends on when that goal is reached and, potentially, on the goodwill of the selectmen.
In an interview this week, Robbins said he initiated the petition drive when it became clear following the selectmen’s Dec. 15 meeting that they would not support a call for a commission, which he had proposed to them as a more open means of exploring a reorganization of town government.
A more open process
“When I learned that there was this working group looking at the question of should we move to a town manager,” said Robbins, “and then when I learned that it was not a constituted committee obligated to post and take minutes, take public input, and so forth, I said, ‘That just doesn’t feel like the right way to do it to me.’” Then he discovered, via a post on Nextdoor Harvard, that a 2011 audit by the Department of Local Services had recommended that Harvard adopt a charter. “I thought, well, it’s not just a harebrained scheme by a local radical; it’s been out there awhile.”
As to why a charter commission is needed now, Robbins says it’s not only a matter of following the open process a charter commission would provide, but also the chance it would offer to sort out a wide range of departmental and committee responsibilities. He noted, as an example, that with long-time Finance Director Lorraine Leonard retiring this year, the School Committee might want to push for its own business manager rather than settling for a finance director who supports both the town and the school district as is currently the case. That issue and the question of whether to change to a town manager form of government, he said, were the two issues that moved him to act now.
“Wouldn’t it be appropriate at the same time we’re changing the mix of work for the town administrator or town manager to also take into consideration other departments [and] other roles as well? Does it only make sense to look at the single position? In a closed and nonvisible process, how do you even get to issues like that?,” he asked. “A charter review is an opportunity to look at everything,” Robbins said.
A mischaracterization
But in a phone interview, working group Chairman Eubank, who is also town moderator, complained that such statements “mischaracterized” the work of his group.
“Somehow people have the feeling that this is a group that’s meeting in private to reorganize town government,” Eubank said. “That’s not the case. This is a group that’s studying the process that would be involved in making a change.” People assume, he said, “that this is a closed process, whereas a charter would be the way to open the process up to the public. It’s being thought of as an either-or situation.
“I’m saddened by that,” Eubank continued. “I think it’s … confusing … because what is suggested is that the charter process is the only way to review potential changes to town government in an open way. This is a small study group that is going back to the selectmen, at which point the … results … will be reviewed by [them] publicly. Any changes that would be made that are significant enough to require substantial action … would have to be approved at Town Meeting. That’s certainly an open process. We’re not planning to come back and say ‘Harvard should do this.’ What we’re coming back and saying is, ‘If these are the kinds of things you want to do, there are a couple of ways you could probably achieve that. Here they are. Now let’s discuss it.’”
Town governance is on the minds of others as well. The League of Women Voters and the Council on Aging announced this week that they will be holding their own forum on governance next Thursday, Jan. 14, at 7 p.m. in Volunteers Hall, as part of their joint series on housing issues. The featured speaker will be Mike Ward of the Edward J. Collins Jr. Center for Public Management at the University of Massachusetts Boston, an expert on town charters.
Timing is everything
For the charter commission petitioners, timing is everything. In order for the question to be placed on the April 12 Town Election ballot, the selectmen must order its inclusion no later than Feb. 12, 60 days ahead of the election. However, the selectmen themselves have 30 days to consider the petition, which means that the town clerk must verify petition signatures no later than Jan. 13 to guarantee the question’s inclusion on this year’s ballot. If the report comes later and the selectmen do not act by Feb. 12, then the question will be delayed until the 2017 Town Election. A friendly board, however, might not insist on waiting 30 days and take action in time to meet the Feb. 12 deadline.
The Bragan-assembled study group consists of six members in addition to Eubank: Chairman of the BOS Ron Ricci; Town Clerk Janet Vellante; Victor Normand, chairman of the town’s Personnel Board; Finance Committee Chairwoman Alice von Loesecke; and former selectman Rick Maiore. According to Eubank, the group has met six times and consulted with four town managers, including former Harvard Town Administrators John Petrin and Paul Cohen, as well as Town Counsel Mark Lanza.
A charter commission consists of nine elected members whose task is to examine all aspects of a town’s governance, hold public hearings, and deliver a charter—in effect a town constitution—that is first reviewed by the attorney general and then adopted or rejected by town vote. Other options for altering particular aspects of a town’s government structure include changing the town’s bylaws or petitioning the legislature.
