Eyewitness To Blunder

This article is written in response to mayoral aide Jason Bartlett’s response to Board of Education member-elect Darnell Goldson’s article on how to fix the illegal make-up of the board as of Jan. 1. The author (at right in photo) participated in the charter-revision process that created the new board.

(Opinion) When New Haven voters looked at their ballots on Nov. 5, 2013, Question 1 read:

“Shall the Charter be revised to establish a seven member Board of Education comprised of the Mayor, four members appointed by the Mayor and two members elected by two districts, supplemented by two non voting student representatives?”

That seems pretty clear, doesn’t it? 

82.1 percent of New Haven voters voted in favor of this charter change.

With language in the charter clearly establishing a seven-member board of education consisting of the mayor, four members appointed by the mayor, and two elected members, along with two non-voting student members, why is there even a debate about the number of members of the Board of Education?

I served on the 2013 Charter Revision Commission, so I can explain the history of the text in question. We originally proposed a hybrid Board of Education consisting of five mayoral appointees confirmed by the Board of Alders and two elected members with staggered four-year terms. We drafted charter language specifying that the mayor would no longer be a member of the board and that the terms of the two appointed members whose terms would have expired in September 2015 would be extended until Dec. 31, and then those people would not be reappointed. This would leave a board consisting of seven voting members and two non-voting student members.

The Board of Alders liked this recommendation but requested that we put the mayor back on the Board of Education. The Charter Revision Commission acquiesced and proposed that the board that we now have: the mayor, four appointed members and two elected members along with the two students..

The math is pretty simple: 1 + 2 + 4 = 7.

Unfortunately, at this point, the text of the proposed charter language wasn’t updated to specify that three rather than two appointed seats would be discontinued at the end of December 2015. And then a series of groups — the charter revision commission (on which I served – sorry, New Haven), the Board of Alders and the corporation counsel — all failed to notice this oversight.

So now we have a charter that specifies a seven-member board starting on Jan. 1, 2016, but we also have five appointed members whose original terms extended beyond January 2016, which would create an eight-person board on January 1, 2016, in violation of the charter.

We can’t go back and rescind the appointment of Daisy Gonzalez to a four-year term because the seat to which she was appointed would be discontinued on Dec. 31, 2015. And we can’t have the Board of Alders revoke its confirmation of Gonzalez and her four-year term. But we can ask what they were thinking.

The mayor seems to think it’s more important to honor the length of the terms of the five appointees whose terms go beyond January 2016 than it is to honor the central intent of the charter revision process: to create a seven-member board of education.

This raises a bigger question: if the language and intent of the charter are so clear, why are the mayor and people who work for her even fighting this? Does the mayor think the Board of Education won’t do what she wants it to do if she has only four appointees this year? (Note that we are talking about only one year, since even the mayor conceded that ​“seven-member board” really means ​“seven-member board” in 2017.)

It’s a mystery to me.

So what do we do now?

The solution is simple: the mayor needs to ask one of her appointees to step down on Dec. 31 so that the city remains in compliance with the charter.

The sooner, the better.