ORDER-2017-165 : Proposed Revisions to City Charter for the City of Melrose as recommended by the Charter Review Committee for consideration by the Board of Aldermen

Transcript (~15 min @ 57:17)

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▶ 57:03 Peter D. Mortimer: Alderman Forbes has made a motion to recommend the budget for the health department and the authorization of the health department revolving account 2659 for fiscal year 218. It was duly seconded by Alderman Makatia Margolis. Seeing no further discussion, all in favor please say aye. Aye. Any opposed, hearing none, thank you for your presentation. This budget will be recommended to the full board for passage.

▶ 57:30 Peter D. Mortimer: The next and last order we have for this evening is order 2017-165. It is proposed revisions to the city charter for the city of Melrose, as recommended by the charter review committee for consideration by the board of aldermen. We have with us deputy city solicitor, David Lucas, and former school committee chair, Kristen Thorp, who worked very hard with the charter review commission, as well as Alderman Zwirko, who was a member of that charter review commission. And Alderman Tramontozzi, who did Yeoman's work as well.

▶ 58:13 Speaker 2: Please proceed, lady and gentleman. Thank you, good evening Mr. Chairman, good evening members of the committee.

▶ 58:20 Speaker 3: My name's David Lucas, I was the, I served as the president of the committee, of the charter review committee.

▶ 58:28 Speaker 1: And I'm Kristen Thorp and I was the vice chair of the committee.

▶ 58:33 Speaker 3: Alderman Zwirko obviously was the clerk of our committee. And first and foremost, Mr. Chairman, I would be remiss not to publicly thank and mention all the members of our committee whose level of professionalism and expertise was off the charts. It was effective. We got viewpoints from many different professionals in the city to the point where one of the proposed changes we've made is actually in the future to require that school committee have a designee on on future committees right now it's

▶ 59:12 Speaker 3: appointments by the mayor and by this by the Board of Aldermen there were many points I'd say a majority of them that if Miss Thorp had not been our committee we would have missed these issues truly her expertise was fantastic and in the future we should have a designee from the school committee on

▶ 59:26 Speaker 2: there the members of our committee other than the three I've mentioned where alderman Tramon Tozzi Park Commissioner William Gardner James shear Robert Healy

▶ 59:39 Speaker 2: Louis Izzy and we had a ninth member who unfortunately had to resign so I'm not

▶ 59:44 Speaker 3: even gonna mention his name we had about five public meetings they were well attended we listened to some very interesting comments from the public and

▶ 59:56 Speaker 3: it was very nice to hear that members of the public took this as a very serious proposal that comes up every 10 years or should come up every 10 years what I

▶ 1:00:04 Speaker 2: want to do is just very generally and very quickly go over some of the changes

▶ 1:00:09 Speaker 2: that we've recommended and as I said during all these public meetings these are only changes we're recommending to the Board of Aldermen the Board of Aldermen can wipe them off totally they could adopt them in part the Board of

▶ 1:00:23 Speaker 2: Aldermen is full authority here the Board of Aldermen can adopt changes that we recommended against but at least considered and I believe I'm not certain but I believe the board has an enumerated list of each vote that we

▶ 1:00:36 Speaker 2: took and we wanted to include all of those so that the committee so that the board could see those votes was which failed as well but were important issues

▶ 1:00:44 Speaker 2: for discussion as the Board of Aldermen may want to take those up themselves so some of the more notable changes that came that were recommended by our committee where probably the biggest one is changing the name of the Board of Aldermen to the City Council that did pass our board now some of these weren't unanimously voted by our committee but they certainly were recommended by our committee changing the term of the president of the Board of Aldermen from one year to two years that's primarily because the current president of the Board of Aldermen is just doing such a fun phenomenal job and because we're running out of space on the inside of the building for pictures

▶ 1:01:23 Speaker 2: a removal of the ban against the mayor from receiving compensation outside of his public office that was a change that was recommended not only by our board but was very popular among some of the members of the public who showed up to

▶ 1:01:39 Speaker 2: our meetings removal of the requirement that the mayor in order to suspend a

▶ 1:01:43 Speaker 3: public official or department head have to file a document with this a public

▶ 1:01:48 Speaker 3: document with the city clerk explaining all the reasons therefore and the

▶ 1:01:51 Speaker 2: termination not becoming effective for 30 days there could be reasons why a determination should happen immediately and there could be some reasons why a termination you know may be private for different reasons empowering the school

▶ 1:02:05 Speaker 2: committee and not the Board of Aldermen as the Charter currently reads to fill a vacancy on the school committee if a vacancy occurs and there is not a so called losing candidate for a school committee who ran during that previous election who was able or willing to serve currently the charter says the Board of Aldermen would appoint that final school committee member we could

▶ 1:02:34 Speaker 2: you tell who came up with that issue and we also recognized that as as we get

▶ 1:02:40 Speaker 3: closer and closer to a fully electronic age it's imperative that notices of

▶ 1:02:45 Speaker 2: public meetings for the city be put on the city website as they are now but it should not just as a matter of course but probably as a matter of a policy so we've recommended that in addition to public notices being on the city bulletin board right behind me that these also go up on the city website some of the very quickly some of the matters that we considered which failed a vote and within our committee we did not propose but they're laid out before you would be to put the position of the city auditor under the supervision of the Board of Aldermen instead of the supervision of the mayor as as the

▶ 1:03:23 Speaker 3: auditor is at present to increase the the time constraint within which an

▶ 1:03:27 Speaker 2: elected official may take a second or a new public position in the city that is an elected official right now under Mass General Laws no elected official can take as i'm sure you know can take a paid position within the city um for a year there was a recommendation that that be extended to two years but that is not something that our committee

▶ 1:03:56 Speaker 2: recommended as a whole um and i'd say uh the only other major um major proposal that that failed was that there was a um a motion to increase the required number of signatures for for free petitions from citizens from 50 to 250 signatures and after a great discussion in our committee

▶ 1:04:16 Speaker 3: we voted unanimously to not change that provision if there's any other specific question mr chairman

▶ 1:04:24 Peter D. Mortimer: we are happy to to answer them um whether by process or substance thank you very much mr

▶ 1:04:30 Speaker 1: lucas miss Thorp do you have anything to add at this time i would just mirror what mr lucas said it really was an excellent group they listened to each other we we talked about the pros and cons of so many issues uh it was a great great group of people to work with um and what we came out with i'm i think the process was uh successful and have have have at it

▶ 1:05:02 Speaker 2: Alderman Zwirko, by the way, did way more work than will be publicly recognized. He really went above and beyond.

▶ 1:05:08 Peter D. Mortimer: Very good, thank you, Alderman Zwirko. President Kahn, please.

▶ 1:05:12 Speaker 1: Yeah, thank you very much for submitting this material to us. And my understanding, Mr. Lucas, is it your recommendation that we have a public hearing relative to this order, is that correct?

▶ 1:05:23 Speaker 2: I would think so. I know that there are members of the public that would probably enjoy being heard.

▶ 1:05:27 Speaker 1: Right, and there are a lot of issues that have been raised here, and there's a lot for us to discuss. And as the speaker of public participation was wondering whether we were going to vote on this tonight, and I certainly don't want to vote on it tonight. I think we need to have a public hearing, and I'd like to have a few meetings where we discuss some of these issues. This is an important subject matter and shouldn't be breezed through. It's unfortunate that we have this at the same time that we're deliberating on our budget,

▶ 1:05:58 Speaker 1: which makes it more difficult for us. But I look forward to discussing a lot of these issues as we go forward and hearing from the public, and you also are indicating that

▶ 1:06:18 Speaker 1: the method of moving forward on this would be seeking approval of a special act by the great general court.

▶ 1:06:22 Speaker 3: Correct, exactly.

▶ 1:06:26 Speaker 1: I think that's all I have for now.

▶ 1:06:27 Peter D. Mortimer: President Conner, if the committee would allow me a little bit of latitude in as much as this is a working committee and it was sent to us by the Charter Review Commission, in regards to your comment, would you be thinking along the lines of holding this in the committee, maybe setting public hearing in July when we're done with the budget? Do you have any further elucidation on that concept?

▶ 1:06:52 Speaker 1: Yeah, I don't think we want to send it back to the full board. We need to have it in committee. I think we need to have a committee public hearing and we probably need to have I certainly think we need more than one meeting to discuss these issues. Particularly now where we're in the midst of the budget and we don't have huge blocks of time available.

▶ 1:07:10 Peter D. Mortimer: I concur, would you be thinking along the lines of setting a public hearing for July, an initial public hearing?

▶ 1:07:17 Speaker 1: I really hadn't given great thought to when you're going to hear the public.

▶ 1:07:21 Peter D. Mortimer: All right, why don't we leave that? We'll leave it in committee most likely, depending on motions made and further discussion. And we can-

▶ 1:07:28 Speaker 1: What you may want to do, Mr. Chairman, and this is only a suggestion, is if we leave this order on the calendar as we go through budget deliberations, we could set a public hearing and a prior budget meeting if we needed to.

▶ 1:07:43 Peter D. Mortimer: Very good, all right, so we can ruminate on that, mull that over a little bit. Further Alderman wishing to be heard, Alderman Zuerchel, please.

▶ 1:07:51 Michael P. Zwirko: Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and thank you, Chairman Lucas and Vice Chair Thorp, for the work. It was a pleasure working with you on this, and it was an accelerated time frame, but a time frame in which we hit our target nonetheless, so thank you for that. And I do want to just say the section of the charter, I believe it's section 9-6, although I think it's going to change to 9-5 if this is approved, does state that a charter review Committee should be impaneled every 10 years it was 12 years since the last review so it was not only overdue but but welcomed as written in the Charter so invoking that clause was timely and important I'll also say that hopefully if this occurs every 10 years as the Charter declares it gets a little bit easier the more you do it maybe the less you have the change or as the demographics of Melrose change or situationally you might find something that's either not in the Charter that needs to be inserted or just generally over overhauled so you know again I've used this a lot when I describe it but it's just simple good hygiene I'm not going to get into much of the discussion I this became my life for six weeks as it did as it did yours I'm probably too familiar with the Charter now at this point but as we have more discussion I certainly will weigh in but I do want to thank the members of the committee my colleague Alderman Tremont Ozzie for his work and I'm looking forward to future discussions and what I would say is to the the members of the both the public and the Board of Aldermen there was about 40 items that we voted up or down on there may be some that are missing that you've thought about so bring those to the discussion but you know we tried to leave no stone unturned and I always felt and I continue to feel that it's important to ask the questions and it's important to you know take bold stances and approaches to these things whether or not they land in a change or they're approved or rejected it's fine as long as you have the discussion so with that I yield my time but I did was really really proud of the work that was done so thank you mr. chairman thank you very

▶ 1:10:04 Speaker 1: much alderman's work up thank you to make a motion a hold order to zero one

▶ 1:10:08 Scott M. Forbes: seven dash one six five in committee second alderman Forbes has made a motion

▶ 1:10:11 Peter D. Mortimer: to retain this order in committee to hold this in a committee said motion was duly seconded by Alderman's work Oh since this is a working committee and we're out of suspension mr. Lucas has indicated that he would like to add thank you mr. chairman I just had a question when the committee's next

▶ 1:10:30 Speaker 2: meeting is scheduled for you will be notified just that's okay well we have them asking the reason I'm asking is section 9 6 of the Charter says the recommendations of the special committee I really don't want to throw a wrench in believe me shall appear on the Board of Aldermen's agenda for action before the 15th day of June in that year and if not so scheduled by the city clerk this matter shall come before the Board of Aldermen for action at its next meeting held following the 15th day of June and no other business shall be in order until such report has been acted upon by roll call vote now I don't know what that if that action means an up or down or if that action means scheduling a public hearing which sounds like what's going to happen but that's something for the board to consider between now and the next committee meeting many meetings between now and

▶ 1:11:15 Peter D. Mortimer: yeah good okay and plenty of them uh thank you president connor has indicated that uh just for members of the viewing public who may not have heard um that we have plenty of uh appropriations committee meetings we we have one coming up monday um so we'll definitely address that and that's a interesting fine point yeah i may send a communication to you in that in that regard before the next meeting right you've read that is is setting a public hearing deemed to be action or does it mean a uh a vote a substantial vote uh alderman's workout did you have further comment

▶ 1:11:51 Michael P. Zwirko: i was just going to comment i'm familiar with that provision i wasn't too concerned about it because i knew we'd be taking some action and to set a date however if it's the will of the committee or the chairman it may be of interest to seek an opinion from the city solicitor on the definition of action in this regard it could certainly be something of just placing a public hearing and deliberating further but if the committee wants further clarity we could seek that opinion from the city solicitor just just throwing it

▶ 1:12:19 Peter D. Mortimer: out there as a suggestion I will definitely take that suggestion and I