[Milva McDonald]: Hi, everyone. Thank you for coming to our public information session. This is the Charter Study Committee. I'm going to just, I'm Milva McDonald. I'm the chair of the committee, and I'm going to introduce the committee members that are here, and then I'm going to hand the mic over to Ron Giovino. who is one of our committee members. We also have Phyllis Morrison, Eunice Brown, Paulette Van der Kloot, Anthony Andriodala, and Jean Zotter. Ron's gonna talk a little bit about the committee, what we've been doing, and I'm gonna hand it over.
[Ron Giovino]: Thank you. Good evening, everybody. For those of you who are watching us for the first time, just to briefly talk a little bit about, it was back in 2022 in November that the mayor appointed this committee to research the current charter, which hadn't been reviewed in almost four decades. It's an 11 member, are we still 11 members? 11 member committee. We do meet every Thursday, every first Thursday of the month. That's been pretty consistent, both on Zoom. You can watch it. So the reason why this meeting is of particular importance is we're targeted to present our recommendations and our thoughts on the charter in the fall of 2024. Currently, we've done dozens of listening sessions, interviews, government official interviews. many different people's interviews. Our survey, which ends this month, is ready to be completed. Do we have like 700 responses to the survey? 600 responses, so we're gonna be compiling that information as another resource for us as we make our decisions. This is our third public event at City Hall. And we've also done various, we've appeared at various city events during the summer, Wright's Pond and different events, just to get the word out that the charter is a very important part of how the city runs and it's time for change and now is the time. We've also partnered with the Collins Center for Public Management from UMass Boston. They guide us when we need guidance, and they'll be with us through the process as we make our presentation in the fall. The commitment from my fellow committee members has always been that we're dedicated to listening, And we're dedicated to do that with great curiosity about what you think and also a great open mind. And I can tell you, you know, we all come with our prejudices and we all come in with our thoughts, but the conversations that we've been having have really made a difference in what we do. And it's extremely important for us as a goal is to listen to the fellow citizens and also tell you what our thoughts are so we can, as a unit, make this charter very successful. So if you haven't seen any of our meetings, our monthly meetings, you will know, our subcommittee meetings, you would know that the level of research that these folks have done on this committee is mind-boggling. The detail has been incredible, and it's really allowed us to make our recommendations. Now our presentation will be filled with recommendations. If you know, we've looked at the role of the mayor in the city, we've looked at ward representation for both the city council and currently looking at the school committee. But the process for us is once we make our presentation to the city council and the mayor, They can accept what we say, they can amend anything they want, they can remove or add anything they want prior to it going to the state house for review. Once the state has reviewed it and approved it, it comes back to you, the voters, and that's really the key part. There's no more powerful person than each one who has one vote on this charter. The person who has more power is the one who actually votes. So that's where we're at. It's been a great year plus learning and listening, and I think charter has become more of a regularly used word in the city at different events, different discussions, on government TV. So I think we're moving in the right direction and we've got a lot more work to do as today, the end of January, it's really the time for us to start picking the final, make the final decisions and start moving forward. And there's a lot of things left on the table and our hope is that the citizens will guide us and tell us what's the most important pieces that we need to do to put in our presentation in the fall. All the input has been tremendous, it's really been helpful, and I speak for myself, it's been eye-opening, but it's a long process and we're getting close to the end, so that's why these meetings become more and more important. So that's what I have to say.
[Milva McDonald]: Thanks, Ron. Yeah, and to echo what Ron said, we are sort of at a turning point in our process. We're going to start, we have provisionally voted on several important issues, but we're really going to be buckling down and doing a lot of votes, making our final decisions on recommendations and drafting a new charter. And that's going to be happening in the coming months. So we'd love to see you at our meetings. And right now we want to just open it up to see if anybody has any questions. or comments. If you're on Zoom, you can raise your hand, or if you're in the hall, just come up to the mic. So we don't have any questions. Okay, so this is going to probably be pretty short since our main objective here was to try to listen to folks. But before we wrap up, I will just say some of the provisional decisions we've made so far, and this has been based on our own conversations, our research, our looking at historical data on representation in the city, our survey results, public feedback, and larger pieces of that we're going to be doing a lot of research. Uh there we are. We've decided not to keep a mayor form of government, a mayor council form of government. And the committee has provisionally voted to recommend hybrid ward representation. With eight. So Medford has eight wards. That The school committee is something that we're still diving into research on, so decisions have not been made on that yet, but we have. And we're also looking at the balance of power because that has been some of the main concerns that we've heard from people are and the balance of power between the mayor and the City Council. So we're looking at that. We have voted to give the City Council, to incorporate in our draft charter, the power for the City Council to confirm mayoral appointments to multi-member boards. At our next meeting, we're gonna be looking at term lengths. which is a trickier question than you would think because there's a lot of moving parts with that in terms of when elections are held, etc. We're also going to be looking at the question of term limits. Then we will be looking at the issue of Our current charter does not have anything in it about how compensation for election officials is decided. So we will be looking at putting a process for that into the charter or recommending a process for that, putting it into our draft charter. And we also are going to be looking at the budget timeline. So these are some of, and very exciting also, we will be looking at, our current charter has no section on citizen participation mechanisms. So right now, whatever a group of citizens can do in terms of trying to initiate change within Medford through ballot questions or whatever has to come from state law. So we can look at that and try to put something in the charter that would allow for citizens to do more of that sort of participatory change in the city. So those are sort of the main highlights of what we have left. There's also a lot of you know, administrative practices and kind of standard pieces that have to be done as well. So we have a lot of work ahead of us, but we've done a lot already and we hope you'll get in touch with us and tell us what you think. And thanks everybody for tuning in. Yes, our survey is closing on January 31st. So if you go to www.medfordma.org slash charter study, it will take you to the survey. Please take the survey if you haven't already. Also there you will find all our materials, the recordings of every meeting we've had, minutes, materials that were presented at the meeting. For instance, all the historical data on representation of city councilors in the city that we collected as part of our process to decide on whether to recommend ward representation, all that can be found on that page. So we hope you'll take a look and thank you all for tuning in.
[Ron Giovino]: just before we, as I said, this is a listening session. So, you know, your comments in terms of what do you think about the process? What can we do better? What can we do less of? What have we missed? What are the things that are important to you? I'll probably give you a few more minutes to step in. I know there's some folks on Zoom listening in. We have a guest here in the hall, but if anybody wants to make a comment before Milva adjourns this meeting, I would suggest that now is a good time to do that. Thanks.
[Milva McDonald]: If you are on Zoom, you can raise your hand or come up to the mic. If there are no questions or comments, we will adjourn. Thank you.
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