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At Wednesday's Legislative Council meeting.
Hamden residents will have the chance to vote for four-year mayoral terms — but not for a new town chief operating officer position — thanks to a final, approved charter-revision question that will be on November’s ballot.
The town’s Legislative Council signed off on that upcoming ballot question during a special, Zoom-assisted meeting Wednesday night.
On Wednesday, the local legislators voted to advance a slate of recommended changes to the town’s primary guiding document — one of which includes a move towards four-year mayoral terms commencing in 2025 — to Hamden voters this fall by passing a resolution that will incorporate those edits into a single question on November’s general election ballot.
That means that Hamden voters will get to vote “yes” or “no” on whether or not the whole set of recommended changes should be adopted. Some of the revisions that voters will get a chance to consider through November’s single charter-revision question include four-year rather than two-year terms for the town’s mayor and town clerk; the introduction of two new commissions, including a citizen finance oversight crew and a volunteer group dedicated to improving diversity, equity and inclusion throughout Hamden; the separation of police and traffic commissions; and the inclusion of youth representation on all town commissions, among other changes.
The question that will appear on the Nov. 8 ballot will ask voters: “Shall the electors of the Town of Hamden approve and adopt the Charter changes as recommended by the Charter Revision Commission and as approved by the Legislative Council?”
That package of proposed charter changes will not include, however, the creation of a new chief operating officer (COO) for the town — a topic that was heavily debated during this past charter revision season.
The Charter Revision Commission had pushed for the inclusion of such a position in the town charter in order to increase professionalism, expertise, and administrative oversight in Town Hall. On Wednesday night, the Legislative Council voted to strip the COO position from the charter-revision recommendations, balking at the cost such a new position as well as its redundancy with the responsibilities of the mayor’s current chief of staff. (See more on that below.)
The local legislature’s decision on Wednesday puts a cap on a multi-year process that has seen two Charter Revision Commissions convened and dissolved before Hamden voters were finally granted an opportunity to cast their own votes on the future structure of local government.
Read more about some of the major revisions agreed upon by this year’s charter revision commission and the Legislative Council in this article here. Read through the most recently edited, publicly available draft of the revised charter here.
So Long, COO
Council President Baez: Charter conversations "valuable."
While the council did vote nearly unanimously — only Councilwoman Kristin Zaehringer abstained from casting an opinion — on moving a new charter forward for the public to review, they did so after eliminating one proposed idea from the semi-final drafts of the town’s primary guiding document.
The council chose to strip the charter of any mention of a chief operating officer, a government job that the charter revision commission recommended mandating as a guaranteed professional to serve as the mayor’s second in command. Read more about that here.
Councilman Cory O’Brien made the first motion Wednesday to strike down the job addition, asserting that “we do need to professionalize our government structure, however I don’t think this is gonna go far enough if that’s what we want.”
He argued that because the mayor would be in charge of appointing a COO and the hiree would ultimately be tasked with following the mayor’s lead and carrying out “their vision,” the position essentially “duplicates what the chief of staff does right now” without “actually giving authority to the COO explicitly.”
In other words, he said he failed to see how the job would improve executive accountability. He suggested the council consider designing an alternative executive role that would be non-coterminous with the mayor and hold more power. But he said such a discussion should take place outside of any charter debate, for now.
In a final plea to either maintain the position in the newly drafted charter or articulate its potential creation as an independent ballot question, commissioner Jackie Downing argued that a COO would be “important to have in the charter.”
“It provides a dictated structure to the mayor’s office that says, ‘You will have a professional who’s familiar with municipal government, with best practices of municipal government, at your right hand.’
“The mayor is elected based on their agenda — based on their platform, their priorities, their vision for Hamden — not their experience in government,” Downing said. “A COO who is knowledgeable in the municipal government realm can help the mayor’s agenda move forward while being mindful of the relative best practices and regulations.”
Sarah Gallagher, who is both a Legislative Council member and served as the chair of the CRC, also implored her colleagues to keep the option to require a COO on the ballot, asserting that “I think we owe it to the public and our voters to allow that decision to go to them.”
When Gallagher first ran for council last summer, she had just completed service on the town’s then-CRC. She said part of the reason she decided to campaign for public office was to reverse the council’s total dismissal of the charter, asserting that the veto robbed residents of an important chance to weigh in on how their town works for them.
Read more about that vote which took place last year here. That saw a year’s worth of charter revision edits killed at the last minute with little public debate or explanation. Since this year’s new council and commission worked together to reinstate the charter revision process and bring it to voters, those long months of work are, two years later, one step closer to official enactment.
Though two council representatives, including Gallagher and Zaehringer, may have been disappointed by the remaining council’s final decision to take the COO out of the charter, Wednesday’s news was ultimately recognized as a moment of positive collaboration between the town’s legislative body and a volunteer commission.
Council President Dominique Baez remembered a similar vote on the charter which took place this time last year, and shared that she was “really upset that it did not pass.”
Even though the original draft did not make it to the voters, she said, “the conversations we’ve had this second time around were valuable.”
“They’re valuable and I believe they’re gonna better our town.”
Nora Grace-Flood’s reporting is supported in part by a grant from Report for America.
Thank goodness the Council had the sense to eliminate the proposed expensive new position in the Mayor’s office. We have so many professionals at Town Hall, not least, all the heads of departments who can advise the Mayor and the Council, that we certainly don’t need another highly paid job in the Mayor’s office.
Jackie Downing is not known to many these days but she was Mayor Amento’s Chief of Staff (or similar title) when I was on the Council. Her expertise as it relates to the Mayor’s office,, such as it is, dates from a time of profligate spending and irresponsible government. I am pleased that, even (probably) without this knowledge of her history, the Council did not follow her advice.