When residents gather for the first public hearing of the Harvard Charter Commission next week, they’ll find a longtime resident with an impressive record of public service seated at the head of the table.
Commission Chairman Paul Cohen has lived in Harvard for 21 years, six of them—from 2000 to 2006—as Harvard’s town administrator. Cohen, born and raised in Lowell, has spent 26 years of his professional life in Massachusetts town government and is currently town manager of Chelmsford, a town with a population of 34,000 spread over 22 square miles. But with three children in Harvard public schools, Harvard, he says, is “near and dear to my heart.”
An open forum
The commission will convene its first hearing in the Hildreth Elementary School cafetorium next Wednesday evening, May 25, at 7 p.m., and it will last until every attendee has had a chance to speak. “Until midnight?” I asked, as Cohen and I sat down for a Saturday morning interview on the second floor of the General Store. He chuckled. “We’d be lucky if it went to midnight,” he said. “But my first concern is turnout.”
“This is a busy time of year. Who’s going to come out when there’s so much going on between graduations and weddings and outdoor activities?” Cohen asked. The commission is not dealing with a crisis, he noted, so there is no sense of urgency. Still, the town voted for a commission in April, and state law requires a first hearing within 45 days of a commission’s election.
Paul Cohen speaks at a previous town meeting.
(Photo by Lisa Aciukewicz)
Outside, as if to illustrate his concerns, the Garden Club of Harvard was doing a brisk business in herbs, vegetables, and flowers at its annual plant sale on the Common. Nearby, bicyclists gathered to support a fundraising bicycle sale for Team Lick Cancer’s entry in the Pan-Mass Challenge race, their colored jerseys bright spots on an overcast day. Cohen himself would have to leave soon to watch his 10-year-old and teammates play in a morning Harvard Athletic Association soccer game. A lone billboard announced the upcoming commission hearing.
That the commission exists at all is the result of a citizen petition initiated last December by Mass. Ave. resident Worth Robbins (a co-owner of this paper) and others. The petitioners collected nearly 700 signatures (15 percent of Harvard’s registered voters), putting the question of whether to elect a commission on the April Town Election ballot. Out of 800 voters, more than 70 percent (571) said they wanted one.
“We just want to hear what’s on people’s minds,” said Cohen of the upcoming hearing. At Town Meeting and Town Election, he continued, voters said they wanted a review of Harvard’s form of government. “What are things that people think should be looked at? What is it that people like or don’t like? Not the personalities.This is not about, ‘Oh, I’m disappointed with the XYZ person who’s holding a position’; that’s not what it’s about. … Regardless of who’s holding a particular office, what responsibilities should that person or board have? It’s about structure.”
The simplest way to describe a charter, said Cohen, is that it’s the document that describes the format of a town’s government. By “format,” he said, he means which boards and positions are elected and which are appointed, when town meeting and election are held, who assembles and presents the annual budget to town meetings, how are warrant articles submitted, and so on.
“We use the word ‘constitution’ or ‘outline’ because [a charter] is that oversight document that lays out who’s doing what and how it’s done,” he said. When the process started several months ago, it was a question “of charter versus no charter.” That was decided by the voters. “The discussion now ought to be, what do you want in a charter as opposed to whether or not it’s good to have one,” said Cohen.
In our hourlong conversation, Cohen’s experience in municipal government was on display as he discussed the structures towns and cities across the state have adopted, some of which he expects to hear proposed at next week’s meeting. With the state’s 300-year tradition of self-government, the variation in formats among Massachusetts towns and cities is “truly amazing,” Cohen said. “It’s a historical hodgepodge.”
Organizing for the future
But he expects Harvard voters will want to retain much of what they have, including an open town meeting as their legislative body and an elected board of selectmen as their senior executive board. A key question, however, is how much of that board’s power and responsibility should be delegated to a town administrator. For example, “When we come out of this, we’re still going to have a police department, fire, and public works,” Cohen said. “It’s a question of how are those functions going to be overseen and who will appoint their chiefs”—the selectmen, a town administrator, or some combination of the two.
Some aspects of government, such as the management of Harvard’s schools, are highly regulated by the state and are off the table, but the topic of which town offices and boards should be elected and which appointed—and by whom—as well as their composition, should be thoroughly discussed, Cohen said.
State law requires that a town have a planning board, which will always be the committee to recommend zoning changes. Public works and Parks and Rec may be up for discussion, he said. “There seems to be lack of clarity on who’s overseeing maintenance of recreational facilities and their use,” Cohen said. “It’s an area where it gets a little confusing.”
Policy versus administration
The best way to look at these issues, said Cohen, is to determine “the policy functions of a town.” The job of the elected selectmen is clearly “to set vision and direction for the community.” But what about other offices and boards? Elected officials usually do the policy, and appointed officials do the administration in a town of Harvard’s size, he said. But with the task of operating a town like Harvard, growing in complexity, some of the operational tasks of its volunteer boards might be better handled by appointed professionals.
But wouldn’t an appointed staff of professionals lead inevitably to costlier town government? “I would say no,” answered Cohen. “It’s not a means to a larger government or a more expensive government. It’s probably a means to a more professional government.”
What about the expectation that a charter would lead to a government with more civility, a goal that seemed to energize some who signed the December petition? “The charter is not going to solve that,” said Cohen. “Ultimately it’s going to come down to the people holding the positions. What the charter does is it determines how those people are chosen … as well as what their responsibilities are.”
I asked Cohen if he expected statements by attendees at next week’s meeting to delve as deeply into Harvard’s town government as he had done in our interview. He answered, “In every community there are a couple hundred active people. We’ll get that level of comment from some of those people.”
The bigger problem, he said, is how to reach and get input from everybody who may turn up to vote on the finished charter. “I don’t doubt that many of the people who are involved in town government will come to the meeting and offer their opinions. But the goal of the committee and community is to have a broad participation. We don’t have a prescribed outcome. I just hope that at the end of the day, something is accomplished and that there’s a better understanding and appreciation [of town government].”
