Two Chelsea City Council committees meet Monday, September 28. At 5:30 p.m. the Sub-Committee on Public Safety takes up scooter safety with the police chief. At 7:00 p.m. the Charter Review Committee meets again on the city manager’s powers, and this time it meets in the City Manager’s Office.
Charter review: five sections are gone from the packet
The committee’s notice, stamped by the city clerk on September 24, lists one substantive item: “Review of items outstanding from the previous meeting (Part IV, City Manager; Part IX, General Provisions; Part X, Transition Provisions).” The meeting is in the City Manager’s Office at City Hall, 500 Broadway, not Room 305, where the committee met on September 22. Item 2 is public comment.
The 11-page packet is the September 22 packet with pages removed. We compared the two line by line. Every section that remains is word for word the same. What is missing:
- Sec. 4-1, both versions: committee member John Byrnes’s redline, and the proposal for a city manager term of up to five years, renewable, with a bar on anyone who served on the council or school committee in the previous twelve months.
- Sec. 4-5, the proposed new procedure for removing or suspending the manager: a preliminary resolution by seven votes, a hearing on request, and a final vote by seven.
- Sec. 4-6, the rewrite of the acting manager provision, which would extend an acting term from three months to four, renewable once.
- Sec. 9-7, which would fix future charter review committees at nine residents named by the council president, no more than three of them councillors.
- Part I, which the September 22 notice listed as outstanding, no longer appears on the list.
A section can drop out of an “outstanding” list for two opposite reasons: the committee settled it, or it set it aside. The committee’s rule, adopted August 3, is that a change goes to the City Council only with six of nine votes. No minutes of the September 22 or August 31 meetings have been posted, and the September 22 meeting was not recorded, so the packet cannot tell us which of those happened to the manager’s term and the removal procedure. They are the most consequential proposals the committee has considered.
What is still on the table
We covered the Part IV proposals and the deletion of the receiver from Part X earlier this month. A closer reading of what remains turns up three things we have not reported before.
Confirmation that confirms itself. The proposed Sec. 4-2 says the manager appoints members of boards and commissions “subject to confirmation by a majority of the city council.” The next sentences keep the current rule that an appointment “shall become effective on the thirtieth day” after notice is filed unless the council votes to reject it. Under that wording, an appointment the council never votes on still takes effect. The same proposal drops the manager’s current power to make a temporary appointment when a seat must be filled to keep services running. On September 21 the council confirmed 17 appointments at once and then noted it had no process for reviewing them, which is the problem this section is supposed to address.
Missing a meeting would no longer cost the seat automatically. Today a board member who misses regular meetings for three consecutive months without leave “shall be deemed to have vacated office.” The proposed Sec. 9-5(f) instead lets the board’s remaining members vote to declare the seat vacant after three consecutive absences, or absence from half the meetings in a year, with ten days’ notice by certified mail. That is a broader trigger, but the outcome now depends on a vote. The proposal is labeled subsection (f), and the packet does not show whether the rest of Sec. 9-5, including the residency requirement and the rule that vacancies be publicly advertised, stays as it is.
A city charter that says “town.” The proposed Sec. 10-5 would transfer records and property from any office whose duties are reassigned “to another town office, board, commission or agency.” The proposed Sec. 10-1 continues “all by-laws” of the city council, a town’s word, where the current text says ordinances. The August 31 packet described the new Part X sections as “standard to other Charters.” The wording suggests at least some of that language was taken from a town’s charter without being converted.
Two other changes in the packet: the proposed Sec. 9-6 would disqualify anyone convicted of a criminal offense involving misconduct in public office, not only felonies, and would vacate a sitting official’s seat on conviction. The proposed Sec. 10-1 also changes which laws the charter overrides. The current text says the charter governs where it conflicts with city ordinances, rules, orders, special acts and acceptances of state law. The proposal says the charter prevails over “any general or special law which would otherwise be applicable.”
Public safety: scooters, 5:30 p.m.
The public safety committee, chaired by Councillor Lisa Santagate, meets in Committee Room 305 on Order 2649 from Councillor-at-Large Leo Robinson, asking for a meeting with the Police Department “to discuss how the City can address scooter safety.” City Manager Fidel Maltez and Police Chief Keith Houghton are invited.
The subject has come up before. At the committee’s April 13 meeting, Councillor Todd Taylor raised the widespread use of electric scooters, and the minutes record Chief Houghton saying that Revere and Boston have the same problem, and that while the chief would like to be able to ticket riders who break traffic laws and confiscate their scooters, pursuing riders who flee is “incredibly challenging” and dangerous for officers. At the same meeting the chief named juvenile violence as the city’s major public safety concern. The department is five officers short.
Neither meeting is likely to be on video
Neither notice mentions a stream or remote participation. Committee meetings in Room 305 have not been recorded, and the charter committee’s minutes of August 3 say members found remote participation “too challenging at this time” with the current equipment. Both meetings are open to the public in person. If you attend and take notes, or if minutes of the September 22 or August 31 charter meetings exist, send them to [email protected].