WESTBROOK – Last fall, voters in Westbrook had their hands full, with four School Committee seats, the mayor and all seven City Council seats up for grabs.
There are no local races in November’s elections, but if residents approve a referendum asking for changes to the city’s charter, they will eliminate those crowded local ballots.
Westbrook’s charter has not been fully reviewed since 1907, though there have been a number of smaller amendments over the years. A charter committee began meeting shortly after November 2010, and got to work on a top-down revamping of the document. If approved, it would, among other things, make major changes in the election timetable and length of office for both the City Council and School Committee.
Mike Sanphy, president of the Westbrook Historical Society and a Westbrook city councilor, said this week that it’s not unusual for a community to wait this long to re-examine its charter.
“I think people don’t bother until something comes up that draws attention to it,” he said.
Drew Gattine, the charter committee’s chairman, said as a former city councilor, he often referred back to the charter for reference, and routinely found himself unhappy with the language and organization. The charter doesn’t even have a table of contents.
“It’s very confusing,” he said.
Confusing charter language has also cost the city money. When Mayor Colleen Hilton took office in 2010, she removed then-Fire Chief Daniel Brock, citing charter language that gave the mayor permission to not reappoint him.
Brock then sued the city in federal court, noting that a 1967 amendment to the charter passed by the state Legislature – which was the procedure for charter amendments in those days – was supposed to modernize the chief’s position, and require that the mayor show cause to remove the chief.
The problem is, the charter now contains both provisions, making it unclear what procedure to follow. In ruling against the city in the suit, Judge D. Brock Hornby called the confusion “facially contradictory,” and said not removing the older language was “a legislative oversight.”
That ruling cost the city $320,000, of which $110,000 was not covered by insurance.
Gattine said part of the proposed changes includes clarifying such language so that kind of problem does not happen again.
The new charter would stagger elections so that it would be impossible to replace a full City Council or School Committee in one blow.
“Everybody runs at the same time now,” Gattine said. “Conceptually, everybody could be turned down at the same time.”
To fix this, Gattine said, the new charter requires no more than two to three seats on the council, and no more than two to three seats on the School Committee, would come up for re-election.
Sanphy said doing that for the City Council would be “very healthy,” and make it easier for voters to pay attention to the candidates, instead of being inundated with too many choices to make.
“There’s not so much competition,” he said.
City Councilor Paul Emery has criticized this suggested change, however. He said this week that he agrees with the sentiment, but thinks simultaneous elections aren’t as big a problem as some may think.
“I don’t think this is a major, major, major concern for the voters,” he said.
Emery also noted that keeping election cycles the way they are is simpler.
“I think it’s expensive, and it’s more work for the city,” he said of staggering elections.
The proposed charter also changes lengths of terms for elected officials, making all City Council and School Committee seats three years. The mayor’s job would be for three year, too.
City councilors only serve two years, and, Sanphy said that’s too short. Now in his second term, Sanphy said, he remembered spending too little time getting to know the position and how to function as a councilor before he had to start campaigning for re-election.
“It takes you a while to get used to it,” he said.
School Committee members now serve for four years, which Alex Stone thinks is too long.
“It’s a long time without the possibility of new people coming on the board,” said Stone, a member. “You need to change it up once in a while.”
If passed, Gattine said the changes to term lengths would be phased in to make sure elections get staggered. Next year, he said, all the councilors, the mayor, and a number of School Committee members will all come up for re-election together as usual, but the mayor’s position would become a three-year term. Only some of the councilors’ and committee members’ positions would become three-year seats, with the rest changed at a future election.
“A couple of (city councilors) will have to run for two-year terms instead of three-year terms so we can initiate the stagger,” he said, and School Committee members will be similarly phased in.
Another major proposal, Gattine said, would change the City Clerk’s position from an elected to an appointed position. That, he said, is a reflection of the times. The clerk’s position, he said, has grown much more complex, and should no longer be decided by popular vote.
“It really is a professional position, and you want to have somebody with specific qualifications and experience in that position,” he said.
City Clerk Lynda Adams agreed that the legal and technical complexity has made the job too important for residents to simply vote for the one they like the best.
“There’s so much more detail involved in this job than there was years ago,” she said. “I think it would be too high a risk to elect a person (to it).”
Making it an appointed position, Adams said, would also eliminate the awkward position the clerk is in when running for re-election, as Adams did last fall, while she was supposed to also supervise the whole election process. That, she said, forced the city to hire additional staff to perform tasks she simply couldn’t do last fall.
“I had to campaign for my job, and also run the election,” she said. “Talk about a conflict.”
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