You should vote “Yes” on the Charter change

In addition to voting for the City Council and School Committee, also on the ballot this year is a change to the City’s Charter. The Charter includes the core laws that govern how the City operates legally. In order to make these changes, voters will have to approve the change.

My suggestion: vote “yes” to change it.

What’s changing

The last time the Charter was updated was 80 years ago. To update the Charter, a commission was created, it made suggestions, the City Council removed some of the more significant changes, and now we have the final result.

Much of the changes are just modernization of the language, structure, and rules, but without any major impact. For example, now that computers exist(!), the voting system can be tweaked (very minorly) to remove the (usually irrelevant, but not ideal) randomness involved in the results in some edge cases.

Beyond that—

The Mayor is no longer chair of the School Committee

The Mayor is not the City’s executive; rather, they are a regular City Councilor who is also the chair of the City Council. Their main power is choosing committee chairs, which help set the agenda for the Council. The City Manager is Cambridge’s equivalent to the job of the Mayor in other cities like Boston; the City Manager is appointed by the City Council.

In January, the new City Council will appoint a new Mayor from among themselves; see the song of the day below for a sense of how that goes. Whatever deals the Councilors make among themselves to choose the Mayor have nothing to do with education. And with the current Charter the Mayor has two jobs, chairing two very different committees.

Much better if the School Committee can choose their own chair, someone who can focus just on the school system. So this is good!

More City Council oversight of appointments

Lots of appointments by the City Manager will now need to be approved by the City Council. Here’s a full list.

This seems fine, most of the time you’d expect them to just be approved. If they’re not, that’s part of what elected officials are for: oversight of our unelected executive.

The arguments against

The only people I’ve seen arguing against the new charter are Suzanne Blier and Heather Hoffman, from the CCC, in a letter to the Cambridge Day.

Their arguments—

Public comment no longer explicitly required at meetings

The new Charter has much vaguer language about public feedback, not mentioning a specific requirement for spoken public comment at meetings. It doesn’t prevent it, though, and I see no reason why it wouldn’t happen. And there is language requiring public feedback more broadly.

It’s true it would be better if this was still explicitly required, but in the end this doesn’t seem like a sufficient downside to cause me to vote against the change.

Changes to the date when people need to apply to be candidates for School Committee and City Council

I feel like being able to figure this out is not a high bar for candidates. The Election Commission posts all the info publicly months in advance.

So I find this uncompelling.

Democratic oversight of appointments is bad, somehow

They claim this will result in patronage, but that’s not how it works. The Council gets a veto, not an ability to appoint people.

This is also uncompelling.

It doesn’t change enough

I don’t like the CCC’s proposed major changes, but there are certainly things that could be better. But we don’t get to vote on a hypothetical better Charter; it’s the new or the old one, that’s it. So this too seems like a bad argument for voting “no”.

My takeaway: vote “Yes” to the change

Here is a letter in support by Councilor Burhan Azeem which goes over the changes and why he supports them. All of this makes sense: for the most part these are all minor tweaks and minor improvements.

The School Committee change all on its own seems sufficient for voting yes. The result will be that both the City Council and School Committee leadership will be more focused on the job they were be elected to do. None of the arguments against seem strong enough to balance this benefit out. And modernization in general seems like a good idea, so future revisions can start from a more modern starting point.

A bit more

Song of the day: I’ll Form The Head by MC Frontalot, featuring Dr Awkward and ZeaLouS1.