At the March 27 City Council regular meeting, the City Council approved a home rule petition creating a new city charter, sending that to the Mayor to sign in order to submit that to Beacon Hill for approval. The Administration previously had indicated they have an issue with this home rule petition not including language making the mayor's term of office four years, up from the current two years. While I agree with the Charter Review Committee and the Administration that a four-year mayoral term would be a best practice here, I'm not willing to imperil years of work by the community, the council, and our staff over this. This new proposed charter doesn't do a number of the things I badly wanted to see it do, but it's also a huge step forward for the City from our current, obsolete charter. We're already behind schedule when it comes to getting this approved at the state level to get it on the ballot for approval by the voters of Somerville this November, so we need the Mayor to sign this immediately.

If you're wondering what a charter is, think of it as the constitution of our municipal government, spelling out how things are organized and how they work. Our current charter dates back to 1899 and is a patchwork of amendments that also has been overridden at the federal and state level so many times over the past 126 years. So it was great news when former mayor Joe Curtatone formed the advisory Charter Review Committee in 2021. Over the next 18 months, the committee set about making recommendations that were delivered in September 2022.

The City Council then took on the task of taking those recommendations, discussing and deliberating, and putting together a proposed charter to submit to the Mayor. Over a course of 13 meetings of the Charter Review Special Committee stretching from November 2022 to May 2023, the council went section by section and finally line by line to arrive at a final version that was sent to the Mayor at our May 25, 2023 regular meeting. The ball was now in the Mayor's court to respond with proposed changes to the council's charter language.

The ball would sit with the Mayor for some time. At the June 20, 2024 meeting of the City Council, the Mayor was asked about the charter and said, "I have not seen the final draft" and cited prioritizing the work around relocating the Winter Hill Community Innovation School to the Edgerly School as the reason her administration had not acted on the document sitting on her desk for over a year.

When the Administration did return a draft of the council's proposed charter language last August with changes they wanted to see made, this kicked off a direct negotiation between the two branches of government. The City Council formed a working group of three councilors -- Ward 1 Councilor Matt McLaughlin, Ward 3 Councilor Ben Ewen-Campen, and Ward 6 Councilor Lance Davis -- to work through the outstanding areas of contention. In the end, the main sticking point seemed to be the length of the mayor's term, with the Administration wanting to change the City Council's language to include a four-year term.

As I mentioned previously, I think a four-year term for the mayor makes sense, just because of the reality of new administrations needing time to get going. In a perfect world, I'd like to see every elected in Somerville get a four-year term when first elected, with two-year terms to follow. To force anyone to run for re-election after one year in office just doesn't seem very reasonable. The voters seem to agree, given how exceedingly rare it has become for a first-term elected to lose a re-election bid in Somerville. Unfortunately, that four-year term followed by two-year terms setup is almost impossible to enshrine in a charter.

But while I agree a four-year mayoral term would be a best practice, this isn't a hill worth dying on -- or more accurately, killing the proposed new charter on. We can get this new charter approved by Beacon Hill and the voters of Somerville and then revisit things we wanted to include, but weren't able to for one reason or another. Things like a four-year term for the Mayor and the powers of budgetary reallocation for the City Council. There is the alternative route of asking the Attorney General to approve a ballot question for voters to amend a charter, and I support doing that for both of these items. Boston went with this approach in order to give their city council the power of budgetary reallocation. And who better to decide directly whether to give the mayor a two- or four-year term than the very people who would be voting for mayor every two or four years?

So I'm calling on the Mayor to sign the home rule petition and get it before Beacon Hill so our state delegation can start the task of convincing their colleagues to support it and get it on the ballot for Somerville voters this fall. Enough is enough. Let's move forward with this.