Charters, Chords Emerge From Election Trail

Steve Mednick emerged from this week’s elections with two more charter revisions under his belt, and a new album of politically inspired original music.

Mednick, a New Haven attorney who specializes in municipal law, is Connecticut’s charter reform guru. Mednick, 70, is also a folk-rock singer-songwriter who has been churnng out albums since launching a second side career in 2006.

Governments hire Mednick to help them review their charters — the constitutions that govern their communities — once every decade and then put proposed updates and reforms before their voters in a referendum. After all that bipartisan hard work, it’s still often a difficult lift to convince voters to vote yes.

He helped four communities do that over the past year: Hamden, Hartford, Fairfield, and Berlin.

Voters in the first two communities did vote yes this week. Hamden in particular approved some significant changes: The mayor there will now have four-year rather than two-year terms. The police commission will grow larger with representation from all parts of town. A new financial review board will independently vet the fiscal assumptions behind proposed mayoral budgets before the Legislative Council votes on them.

Fairfield and Berlin voted no.

In an interview on WNHH FM’s ​“Dateline New Haven,” Mednick reflected on the lessons of those experiences and others over three decades of advising local governments on charter revision.

It helps sell longer mayoral terms if legislative terms remain shorter, he observed. The argument for four-year rather than two-year mayoral terms is that the mayors and their teams need time to put plans and policies in place without facing short-term reelection campaign pressures. The argument against, in some cases, is that longer terms give the executive branch too much power. Mednick said that in Hamden, where Council members retained two-year terms, a convincing argument was that they obtained more of a ​“check on the mayor” by running on their own in years the mayor doesn’t.

Another ongoing issue is how to frame questions: Should a community combine, say, all three or five or 10 changes into one question that appears on the ballot? Or should each question appear individually as separate questions that voters can choose or reject?

New Haven learned the perils of the former approach in the 1990s when firefighters campaigned against one suggested provision change and in the process convinced voters to torpedo the whole package, including a proposed switch to four-year mayoral terms.

Mednick observed that the latter approach didn’t work any better in Berlin, even though four questions were listed separately. Only one provision was controversial (changing a provision that guaranteed visiting nurses’ services to all town residents). But all the questions went down, as most voters don’t end up learning about all the questions on the ballot. So if they’re against one provision, they may tend to vote no on other questions even if separately listed.

Mednick’s advice to towns is, if they decide to list all proposed changes into just one referendum question on the ballot, make it an ​“omnibus question” — meaning the ballot text include descriptions of all the proposed changes rather than simply offering a general sentence referring to proposed changes.

The biggest change Mednick has noticed in 30 years: even charter questions can become politically toxic in today’s hyper-partisan times. He makes a point of leaving his own political views behind when he advises towns on charters. He advises including all views in the process. For the first time, he found himself accused of injecting bias this year — liberals in Fairfield accused him of being part of a ​“right-wing cabal” because a Republican first selectwoman was in charge of of the town, while in Hamden out-of-power Republicans accused him of ​“writing a left-wing manifesto” because a Democrat was in charge of the town.

Mednick appeared on ​“Dateline” also to promote his new album. Entitled 1952, it is the fifth album Mednick has released since the start of the pandemic, and his 20th to date. 

The album features meditations on the political climate as well more personal takes.

Mednick has signed on to help two more communities craft charter revision proposals this year. He also has two more albums he plans to complete.

At least.

Meanwhile, New Haven will launch its once-a-decade charter revision process this year.

Click on the video to watch the full interview with Mednick on ​“Dateline New Haven.” You can hear two songs from 1952 on the episode: ​“Version of the Truth,” at the 40-minute mark; and ​“Fulton Hill,” about growing up in Waterbury and Milford beach, at the 50-minute mark.

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