The need for charter reform in Somerville is not new. Calls for reducing the mayor’s executive authority and strengthening the checks-and-balances role of the City Council as this city’s legislative body have percolated for decades. The combination of a “strong mayor” system and an unstaffed and underpaid council have combined to create a situation in which significant electoral pressure on the mayor has been nearly the only effective method to generate policy change.
Mayor Katjana Ballantyne’s recent attempt to secure a four-year term for mayors – removing future executives from the public pressure of biannual elections – is a dangerous step.
Somerville’s charter process to date
The current city charter reform effort has been underway since October 2020, when former Mayor Joe Curtatone and then-council president Matt McLaughlin announced the formation of an advisory charter review commission. That volunteer commission was seated in March 2021 and produced a report in September 2022 that was sent to the City Council to be used as a guide for preparing a charter home rule petition.
McLaughlin appointed me to lead the council’s efforts as chair of a Charter Review Special Committee. Over the next six months, the entire council deliberated every two weeks and produced the text of a charter proposal that passed unanimously in May 2023 and was sent to the mayor’s desk for signature. As a document, it was far from the lofty policy goals expressed at the start of the process in 2020, but it was legitimate.
The council received no response for more than a year.
In September 2024, Ballantyne presented a counterproposal that sharply limited the council’s authority. We gamely reconvened our committee and engaged in another six months of deliberation and negotiation. In March, another version of a charter passed unanimously.
Today, we are met with the mayor once again submitting a set of charter revisions that extend the term and powers of the executive. We are told that any objection is mere obstructionism.
Ballantyne’s end run
Despite the two unanimously passed charters we have proposed in the past two years, each of which maintained a two-year term for the office of mayor, Ballantyne has proposed a binding ballot question that puts the question of mayoral term length – and only mayoral term length – before the electorate.
Neither Somerville’s existing nor the proposed charter contain provisions for binding ballot referenda or recall provisions. The dangers of these mechanisms have been noted by experts from the Collins Center for Public Management at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, and demonstrated by recent examples across the country. Indeed, it was a statewide ballot measure in 1994 that still prevents us from having rent control here in Somerville.
Ballantyne proposes to create this temporary authority to place the question of a four-year mayoral term, absent any context, before the voters on the next ballot. The ability to put an advisory question to the voters of Somerville is one we already have: We could simply direct the mayor and council to take action. This proposal, to do it instead as a “one-time only” binding referendum to obtain a power that has been previously rejected, is outrageous.
Law is the responsibility of the Legislature
I have supported, and will continue to support, efforts to put questions on the ballot and hear the will of the people. Indeed, getting more of my neighbors’ voices into civic conversations has been a cornerstone of my civic work, from the creation of the Union Square Neighborhood Council to the hundreds of neighborhood meetings I’ve hosted in my tenure as Ward 2 councilor.
I take my role as a legislator seriously, though. Our charter is the city’s constitution; it is the bedrock document from which all other authority is exercised. It is inherently a document of law and a product of the legislature.
I truly believe that the role of the legislature is to exercise its powers fully, not abdicate them. We are seeing on the national stage the consequences of a legislature that shrinks from exercising its powers.
Executive overreach has corrosive consequences.
My proposal
If we seek to place fundamental questions of governance directly to the ballot, we should do so wholeheartedly instead of selectively. There are a host of questions the council (and the advisory commission before that) considered and opined on. I disagree with many of these conclusions, but I have respect for the process that led to them.
Now those deliberations are disrespected and sought to be tossed aside by our mayor in lieu of a direct appeal to voters, and our council may well assent. While I do urge my colleagues to walk back from that ledge, I will also not shrink from exercising this newly created authority if it is to proceed.
Should the City Council have its own legal counsel?
Should city staff include a chief administrative officer outside of the mayor?
Should the city reduce the voting age to 16 and extend the right to vote to noncitizen residents?
Should the city use ranked-choice voting instead of municipal primaries?
Should the City Council have financial apportionment powers, a line-item veto to redirect budget dollars toward other public priorities?
Should the mayor be required to present the city budget with at least 45 days for the public and legislature to review it?
None of those measures are included in the current proposed charter, though all have merit, all were vigorously debated and all found an answer in versions of the charter that have now been passed, not once but twice, by this same council.
But if we are to resolve one policy question with a ballot question, I propose that we should ask these also. After all, if the mayor is allowed to place a question directly before the voters, surely the council should be able to do so as well.
J.T. Scott is Somerville’s Ward 2 city councilor.
A stronger
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