Chelsea is rewriting its city charter, and one of the proposed changes would delete the last references to the receivership from the document that governs the city.
The rationale, written into the committee chair’s own packet, is three words: Remove references to receivership.
It is a small edit. It is also the city proposing to close the book on the worst thing that ever happened to it, eleven days before it holds a public event to remember that same thing.
What is actually on the table
The Charter Review Committee, chaired by Council President Roberto Jiménez-Rivera, has been working through the charter part by part since August. The packet prepared for its August 31 meeting sets out proposed changes to Part I, Part IX and Part X, each with a stated rationale.
Most are housekeeping. “Standardizing language.” “Clarifying language.” Definitions moved from one part to another. The kind of thing that matters to lawyers and nobody else.
Three are not housekeeping:
Removing officials who commit crimes. The packet proposes “adding language for criminal misconduct while holding office.” Chelsea does not have to reach far for a reason to want that.
Removing officials who stop showing up. A member of a board or commission would be treated as having vacated the seat after missing regularly scheduled meetings for three consecutive months without leave from the chair, or after a year’s absence even with permission.
Erasing the receiver. Part X of the current charter still preserves “all administrative orders adopted by the receiver.” The proposal strikes it.
Why that last one matters
On September 11, 1991, the Legislature passed a special act placing Chelsea under state receivership. James F. Carlin was sworn in the next day and voided the city’s contracts within hours. He took a salary of one dollar a year.
The city had a deficit of roughly $9.5 million against a budget of about $40 million. It could not make payroll for teachers, police and firefighters. It could not open its schools that September; a third of the teaching staff had been laid off and some 3,700 children stayed home. Mayor John “Butch” Brennan resigned. He was the last mayor Chelsea ever had.
Four men who had served as mayor between 1977 and 1991 were convicted in the corruption investigation that followed. A police captain went to jail.
Carlin served about ten and a half months. Lewis “Harry” Spence took over and ran the receivership through the process that produced the government Chelsea has today: no mayor, no board of aldermen, an eleven-member council and a city manager who answers to it. Voters approved that charter in 1994. The state handed the city back in 1995. Chelsea was named an All-America City the same year.
Chelsea is the only Massachusetts city ever placed in full state receivership, and the first placed under state control since the Great Depression. Springfield’s finance control board in 2004 was a different and softer instrument, and the housing authority and school receiverships elsewhere are different things again.
That sentence in Part X is the last trace of it in the city’s founding document. Striking it is defensible. The orders it preserves are three decades old. But it is worth naming what is being proposed, because it is not nothing.
Eleven days apart
On September 16, the city is holding “Chelsea: Then and Now” in the City Hall Council Chambers. All four city managers Chelsea has had since the charter took effect will be there: Guy Santagate, Jay Ash, Thomas Ambrosino and Fidel Maltez. It marks 35 years since receivership.
Two weeks after that panel, a committee may recommend deleting the receivership from the charter entirely.
Both things can be right. Remember it publicly, retire it legally. But somebody should ask the question out loud at that event.
Why now and not 2030
The charter says a review committee shall be established “in every year ending in zero.” This is 2026.
The answer is that the 2020 review never really happened. It was announced in January of that year by then-Council President Roy Avellaneda, with applications due at the end of February and a first meeting expected in March. The pandemic arrived that same week.
Jiménez-Rivera has said community members raised concerns about how weak public engagement was in that disrupted 2020 process. This review is the correction.
The structure reflects it. The 2020 committee was built with an elected majority: five residents, five councillors and three school committee members. This one is the other way round. Five of the nine members are residents who hold no office.
Who is on it
Council President Roberto Jiménez-Rivera chairs. District 2 Councillor Deron Hines, District 3 Councillor Norieliz DeJesus and School Committee member Katherine Cabral serve alongside him.
The five residents are Karla Alvarado, John Byrnes, Lois Contreras, Jen Hassell and Kelly Zimmerhanzel.
How to actually be heard
This is the part that matters, and it has deadlines.
The committee has scheduled 14 public meetings running from August through January, all open to the public under the Open Meeting Law. It is taking written comment through a form at chelseama.gov/charter-review, and it has set soft deadlines for each part of the charter:
Part 4, the City Manager — September 11. That is six days away, and it covers the most powerful office in Chelsea government. If you have a view on how the manager is appointed, removed, or held accountable, this is the week.
Part 2, the City Council — October 14.
Part 3, the School Committee — October 21.
Part 5, Budget and Finance — November 1.
Parts 6, 7 and 8, covering commissions, elections and citizen participation — November 15.
Parts 1, 9 and 10 remain open.
Whatever the committee recommends goes to the City Council, and from there to the state Legislature before the 2027 filing deadline. Chelsea’s charter is a special act, so changing it takes a vote on Beacon Hill.
Which means the window where residents can shape it is now, and it is measured in weeks.
One open question
The packet itself flags an unresolved issue, in the committee’s own words: should the size of a future charter review committee be written into the charter, and should its members require approval from the City Council?
That is a question about who controls the next review. It deserves more than nine people in a committee room deciding it.