The town will hold its final public hearing on the charter revision process on Wednesday, April 27. Charter Review Commission (CRC) Chair Joseph MacDougald, said this will be an important opportunity for residents to understand the nuances and challenges of updating the town charter and the long-term implications Madison is facing with its charter.

The town has not had a significant change to its charter in close to two decades, according to MacDougald. Revision is required every 10 years, but voters rejected the last charter revision referendum, so the document and its policies are in desperate need of updating, said MacDougald.

“The biggest thing is that we’d like to make sure that people attend the public hearing,” MacDougald said. “The charter genuinely matters, and with ours the big theme is that ours had fallen into a rickety and unkempt nature. It had circular references. It had things that were an anachronistic and didn’t follow town practice, because it hadn’t been truly updated in almost 20 full years.”

MacDougald, is also a former Planning & Zoning Commission chair, selectman, and former acting first selectman, said there are several important changes that this CRC is recommending. The commission is ad hoc and does not have enactment powers, but the recommendations of its review will be sent on to the Board of Selectman (BOS) for further consideration.

According to MacDougald, one of the most important recommendations the CRC will pass on to the BOS is term restructuring for the office of first selectman.

“One of the things we are doing is we are recommending changing the term of the first selectman from two years to four years,” MacDougald said. “That comes from enormous feedback we got. But remember, that could also be a question put separately to the voters.

“The reason that we on balance are recommending four years is that, it wasn’t just town staff, and it wasn’t just the selectman, it was a number of different groups that came to us stating it was very difficult to plan when the top of town government starts to move every two years,” he continued. “It’s too chaotic, and you can’t provide long-term planning. Two years is simply too short of a term.”

This recommendation would be for the first selectman’s office only. The other selectmen’s terms would remain at two years, according to MacDougald.

Another change the commission is recommending are a series of measures to bring the entire charter to reflect current policy, MacDougald said.

“One of the things we did, which in our view brought the charter up to date…was remove references to newspapers…right now state statute has us putting all of our notices in newspapers, and we have to follow state statute, but if a future time came, we didn’t want the charter to insist on a particular method of communication,” MacDougald said. “We also changed dollar amounts and quorum numbers. Some of the quorum numbers hadn’t been reset for 20 or 30 years.”

According to MacDougald, increasing the dollar amounts of town actions that trigger a town meeting will aid voters. Currently town meetings are mandatory for small and sometimes innocuous matters.

“Our feeling is that when the community sees a notice for a town meeting, they should know it’s a significant thing. To have town meetings all the time, like we do now…how do residents know what’s important and what’s not?” MacDougald asked.

MacDougald pointed out an example of something as small as throwing out desks with a value that exceeds $5,000 would currently trigger a mandatory town meeting. According to MacDougald and the CRC, this is not the best use of town resources and diluted the original purpose of calling a town meeting, which is to alert residents to important upcoming discussions or issues.

“We are recommending that we account for inflation and the growth of the town,” said MacDougald. “So that we aren’t having so many administrative town meetings as opposed to meaningful ones. That has a big impact. It’s a burden, it takes away from other duties, and takes staff, time, and money for things that aren’t all that significant. They will still go through then BOS and Board of Finance, but they just don’t need a town meeting.”

One change that the CRC considered but held off on making any recommendations was changing the Planning & Zoning Commission (PZC) from appointed to elected positions.

“We met with members of the PZC, Republicans, Democrats, Independents. We listened and had a discussion and we concluded that the CRC is not recommending that at this time. There are a lot of good reasons not to bring that up as an elected body. That will go to the BOS and we will see if they agree.”

According to MacDougald, some of the other recommendations include removing charters for certain commissions as some individual committees and commissions can be combined and altered, streamlining and melding some of those entities.

MacDougald said one of the biggest topics of discussions was whether a town manager was necessary or a representative town meeting form of government, such as adopted by Clinton in 2019. The CRC is not recommending a change at this time, but stressed that changing the form of government is a complex and requires a completely different charter.

“This is a significant and hot-button issue. If you put forth a town manager charter, and it gets voted down, we would still have the rickety charter that was never updated. So by passing this charter, we can now say this one’s in place and then we can use this as a basis for another charter review commission to decide if that move makes sense.”

Some of the other recommendations include providing options for de-gendering terms such as “selectman,” tightening up the language around the budget process, clarifying emergency action powers of the selectmen, modernizing and clarifying policy, and also putting some of these changes to a separate vote to the public, rather than as a blanket up or down on the entirety of the recommended revisions.

MacDougald praised the efforts of the commission and in particular Town Services Coordinator Lauren Rhines for their help in assisting and preparing the draft.

“The extraordinary work of Lauren Rhines on this project can’t pass without notice. She has done and incredible. This process was extremely complicated and wouldn’t have been possible without the incredible dedication of town staff and in particular, Lauren’s efforts,” MacDougald said.

MacDougald stressed the importance for residents to make their voices known by attending the meeting.

“We are going to listen that day to anything the public says, and decide, based on that feedback, if we need to make changes. We have another meeting scheduled for [thda, April 28] as part of that process so we can further consider any comments from the public, and then we are going to be handing that draft to the selectmen” on Friday, April 29, MacDougald said. “The charter is the guiding principle for our town. We need this guideline.”