The Charter Review Committee meets Tuesday, September 22 at 7 p.m. in Room 305 at City Hall to take up Part IV of the city charter, the article that creates the city manager. The packet for that meeting contains the first detailed proposals to change it. Two members submitted language. John Byrnes, one of the five resident members, proposes fixing a typo. Council President Roberto Jimenez-Rivera, who chairs the committee, proposes rewriting most of the article.
His draft would put the city manager on a fixed term of up to five years, require council confirmation of every board and commission appointment, spell out a removal procedure with a public hearing, and add to the manager’s duties an annual State of the City address, a communications strategy and a public performance dashboard. It would also bar anyone who has sat on the council or School Committee in the previous twelve months from being hired as manager. We described the committee and its schedule earlier this month. Here is what is in the packet.
A term of office
The charter now says the council “shall appoint and may remove by an affirmative vote of seven members the city manager,” and that the employment agreement must run at least two years. It says nothing about a maximum. The proposal replaces that with a “term of office of up to five years,” renewable by council vote. In practice Chelsea’s managers have served on multiyear contracts already; the change would write an outer limit into the charter rather than leave it to the contract.
The qualifications stay mostly as they are: five years as a city or town manager or assistant, or equivalent experience, and a bachelor’s degree. The draft adds two things. The manager “shall not have served as a member of the city council or school committee for at least twelve months prior to appointment.” And the council’s power to waive the requirement that the manager move to Chelsea within a year would need a majority vote; the current text sets no threshold.
Confirming appointments
This is the change with the most day-to-day effect. Under the current charter the city manager appoints members of boards and commissions, and the appointment takes effect 30 days after notice to the council unless a majority of the full council votes to reject it. The council has no formal vote to make; it can only block. The proposal says appointments are made “subject to confirmation by a majority of the city council,” and the same for filling unexpired terms.
The draft keeps the 30-day language in the same paragraph, so as written an appointment would both require confirmation and take effect automatically after 30 days if the council does nothing. The committee will presumably have to pick one. The question is live: the council took a slate of 17 appointments to second reading last week under its own two-readings rule and votes on them Monday, a practice that layers an affirmative council vote on top of the charter’s passive-approval design.
New duties
The list of the manager’s powers and duties grows from 17 items to 20. Most of the current items survive with new wording. The additions:
An annual State of the City address. A duty to “be responsible for city government communications,” including a “timely and comprehensive communication strategy,” coordinating department heads’ announcements, keeping the website current, and “soliciting recommendations for greater communication from residents.” A “public-facing data and performance management initiative” that “periodically monitors, reports, and benchmarks progress on the implementation of the council’s strategic priorities” and key performance measures for departments, boards and commissions. And a full written report of city operations at least once a year, “made available to the public.”
Two items shift power slightly toward the council. The manager would be “responsible for implementation of policies established by the city council, as reflected in the city council’s votes and resolutions,” a sentence the current charter does not contain. And the manager’s power to investigate any department would extend to bodies outside the manager’s control “when directed so to do by the city council.” One item goes the other way: the current requirement that rental agreements longer than five years be approved by the council disappears from the facilities clause, though the new contracts clause says all contracts “shall be subject to funding by the city council.”
Removal, with a hearing
The current charter’s removal power is a single clause: seven votes. The proposal adds a procedure, in a section the packet labels as new. The council adopts a preliminary resolution stating reasons, which can suspend the manager for up to 45 days. The manager has five days to request a public hearing, which must be held 20 to 30 days later, and may file a written response. A final resolution of removal needs seven votes and must come 10 to 21 days after the preliminary one, or within 10 days after the hearing. Miss the window and the preliminary resolution is void and the manager returns to work. Salary continues until the final vote.
The draft’s opening sentence says the council may remove the manager “by a majority vote of the full council,” while both resolutions inside the procedure require seven votes. That is another inconsistency the committee will need to resolve; seven of eleven is what the charter requires now.
Acting managers
The rules for absences and vacancies get longer. The manager still designates a stand-in by letter, but the council could revoke that designation by a two-thirds vote in the first ten working days and by seven votes after that. When the office is vacant, naming an acting manager would take seven votes rather than a simple appointment, and the acting term would run four months, renewable once, instead of the current three plus three. Neither a temporary nor an acting manager could make permanent appointments or removals.
The items carried over
The agenda also lists proposals left over from the August 31 meeting on Parts I, IX and X, most of them Jimenez-Rivera’s. Boards could declare a seat vacant by majority vote when a member misses three consecutive meetings or half the meetings in a year, after ten days’ notice by certified mail; today the charter says such a member “shall be deemed to have vacated office” after three months. The disqualification clause would extend beyond felonies to any “criminal offense involving misconduct in any elective or appointive public office,” and would automatically vacate the office of a sitting official so convicted. The charter review provision would be rewritten to match how this committee was actually formed: nine members appointed by the council president, no more than three of them councillors, all residents, reporting within the year unless the council extends the deadline. And three new transition sections would keep agencies, employees and records in place through any charter amendment; one of them, copied from a model, refers to “another town office.”
What Byrnes proposed
Byrnes’ one-page submission changes “bachelors degree” to “bachelor’s degree” in Section 4-1 and leaves the rest of the section alone.
How this becomes law, if it does
The committee set its own threshold in August: six of nine votes to recommend any change to the council. Its schedule calls for the council article in October, the School Committee later that month, and a final report in January. Whatever the council then adopts goes either to the Legislature as a home rule petition or to the voters, depending on the change. Public comment opens each meeting, two minutes per speaker, and written proposals go through chelseama.gov/charter-review. Tuesday is the first meeting at which residents can respond to this text.
Jimenez-Rivera told the audience at Wednesday’s receivership panel that not every part of the charter needs an update, “but some of them might.” For the office the panel spent two hours praising, his draft is the list.