With two weeks to go until a final charter must be submitted to the selectmen, the Charter Commission has found itself with more commentary to wade through, including a recently submitted 20-page report on the current draft. The report was commissioned by Harvard’s League of Women Voters and prepared by the Edward J. Collins Jr. Center for Public Management at the University of Massachusetts Boston.
Written by Michael Ward, a consultant at the Collins Center, the report was completed Sept. 11 but did not reach the commissioners until Sept. 20, one day after their most recent meeting, at which they revised a half dozen of the charter’s most controversial provisions.
Overall, Ward concluded, the changes proposed by the commission were “broadly similar” to what other town commissions have proposed, including the strengthening or revitalizing of the executive branch of government as the “the leader of long-term and strategic planning.” This typically includes some of the steps Harvard’s commission has proposed, Ward wrote, “including converting elected positions and boards to appointed, giving the town administrator more day-to-day responsibility and authority, and (thereby) giving the Select Board more time and clearer mandate for policy making.”
But charged by the league to call out portions of the charter that differ from language and approaches found in comparable Massachusetts town charters, Ward identified more than 50 instances where the proposed text differs from conventional text, “in either substance or form.” These range from a provision that conflicts with Massachusetts state law to sections that either duplicate or conflict with others in the document, some requiring straightforward edits and others best fixed by restructuring charter articles. Whether these differences are right or wrong for Harvard, he wrote, was not a judgment the Collins Center was prepared to make. It will be up to the commission to respond.
In a brief email to the Press, Charter Commission Chairman Paul Cohen wrote that the commission “will consider the comments from the Collins Institute and from town residents as it prepares its final charter document during the next two weeks.”
A copy of the report is available here.
Section 3-1c of the proposed charter is the one section that must be altered because it violates Massachusetts law, according to both the attorney general and the Collins Center report. As written, the section implies that the town could adopt a bylaw to prohibit certain voters from holding an elected office. But according to the state constitution, no registered voter can be prevented from running for office by state law or town bylaw.
‘We want to educate voters’
In an interview with the Press this week, League of Women Voters board member Sharon Briggs said that a three-member league working group—Briggs, Joe Hutchinson, and Marge Darby—has been studying the charter since June. The league does not typically take positions, she said, but as it studied the 24-page preliminary charter, the group realized it needed more expertise. The league had already allocated money for a forum or study of the charter and had a provisional contract with the Collins Center to do the work. Briggs said the league offered on several occasions to do the study on behalf of the Charter Commission, but the commission never responded. So following the release of the commission’s preliminary report last month, the group decided to go ahead on its own. The result is the document now in the hands of the commission, which was likely to have been discussed at its planned Sept. 27 afternoon meeting.
“We want to educate the voters,” Briggs said. “You can’t expect the voters to go to the ballot having digested a 24-page document and then do a yes or a no. That’s the league’s mission: to educate voters.” The study was also a way for the working group members to educate themselves, she said. And based on its study of the Collins Center report and the August draft charter, the working group has submitted its own eight-page commentary to the commission for its consideration.
Meanwhile, the Press learned this week that the commission has received 11 written comments at its website since Aug. 14 (chartercommission@harvard.ma.us), one of which was the Collins report and three of which were spam messages. Chairman Cohen, however, did not see the Collins Center report until Sept. 20, when Hutchinson emailed it directly to him using a personal email address.
The commission must submit a final charter to the selectmen and attorney general by Oct. 12. The town will vote to adopt or reject it at the May 2018 Town Election.
