A BIRD'S-EYE VIEW OF CHARTER REVIEW

 

 

Ready or not, the 2026 Charter Review will be upon us before you know it and you really should be ready for it – but only if  you care one iota about where this community is headed.

I will begin where my previous blog post on this subject left off with Street Philosopher Arico’s wise analysis of the citizenry:

There are three kinds of people.

There are those who make things happen,

those who watch things happen,

and those who look around and ask: When did THIS happen?

Here’s a subtle message for those of you in group number three:

THIS CHARTER REVIEW HAS THE POTENTIAL TO CHANGE GOVERNMENT AND AFFECT YOUR LIVES IN WAYS THAT ARE NOT CLOSE TO BEING ON YOUR RADAR SCREEN!

Remember when you made one of your routine trips to the Main Street Post Office, only find that it was closed forever? And you said to yourself or to a person nearby: When did THIS happen? Or, HOW did this happen?

 Well, the disappearance of the Post Office had nothing to do with Charter Review. But it could very well have an influence on the next Charter Review. I will get to that later, at some point in this multi-blog post rallying cry.

But, for now, here’s my bird’s-eye review of the last Charter Review.

Beginning on October 6, 2020 and ending on August 3, 2021, the Charter Review  Committee met 20 times and its subcommittees met 17 times.

The Committee was composed of all 9 town councilors and 6 members of the community, selected by the council president. All members are pictured above with the exception of Ken Woodland, who resigned from the Committee and the town council on April 9, 2021 to accept a position with the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, leaving the Committee with these  15 members:

Council President Sideris;

District Councilors Kounelis, Feltner, and Piccirilli;

At-large Councilors Palomba, Donato, Bays, and Gannon

Resident Members: Bill Oates, Marcia Ciro, Jonathan Hecht, Leo Martin, Jimmy Mello, and Anne Fitzpatrick.

It had been 10 years since the Charter had been updated to reflect a significantly changed community landscape. Front and center stood the reality that Watertown would soon be searching for a new town manager for the first time in 30 years. And the amendments selected by the Committee reflected that reality.

To be added to the new Charter, all of those amendments would have to be approved by the voters on November 2, 2021.

If this ballot question, bundling all of the amendments (except one), looks familiar then you probably voted either YES or NO, to either accept or reject ALL of the amendments.

 

Please take a moment and strain your eye muscles hard enough to identify each of the proposed amendments. For a lot of us, a casual scanning will not suffice.

If you voted YES, on Question 2, you voted for all of the above amendments, including ones that you didn’t support and may not have seen buried in the wall of text. If you voted YES, you were one of 3,790 citizens who voted to pass all of the amendments.

If you voted NO, you were one of 1,924 citizens who voted to reject all of the amendments.

If you didn’t vote, you were one of the 19,524 registered voters out of  25,693 who remained on the sidelines.

 So, if you later discovered that Watertown suddenly had a Human Rights Commission, and you asked: When did THAT happen? - Now you know.

If you later began wondering how our small government infrastructure got so big, with so many new people filling so many newly created high-salary positions – now you know where it started.

If you wonder how the “City Known as the Town of Watertown” suddenly became the City of Watertown, and our Town Council became the City Council, and our Town Hall became City Hall…well, that was a different amendment and it had its very own ballot question – Question 1.

 3,379 of your fellow citizens voted YES to change the official name of the city to the City of Watertown, while 2,455 voted NO, to leave it as the City Known as the Town of Watertown.

Do you find it strange that this proposed amendment got its very own ballot question, while all of the others got crammed into another ballot question? That happened because Councilor Donato persuaded the Charter Review Committee that it deserved special treatment because many residents would find this to be an especially sensitive issue.

Of course, it would not have been on the ballot in the first place, had the Committee not voted in favor of adopting the amendment. The vote wasn’t close. The members voted 10-4 in favor of changing the name. Only President Sideris, Councilors Donato and Kounelis, and Member Hecht voted NO.

I won’t tell you how I voted on Question 1, but here’s a picture of me battling to retain some shred of our city’s townish-ness:

  

 Well folks, that’s it for now. I’ll be back soon with more Charter talk, but I want to leave you with two thoughts.

First: the next Charter Review Committee will be a lot leaner, with only 9 members instead of 15. The influence of city council members will be greatly reduced by having only 3 members rather than 9. I expect that the influence of the 6 members of the community serving on this Committee will be significantly greater due to this rebalancing.

Second: the biggest issue that came before the previous Committee was voted down. But after the developments of the past five years, it might prove to be the blockbuster issue confronting the 2026 Charter Review Committee that few people see coming.

 Bruce Coltin, The Battle For Watertown