By Adam Swift
City Manager Fidel Maltez recently asked the city council to reaffirm its 2021 vote on proposed amendments to the Chelsea City Charter.
At last week’s city council meeting, several councilors said that rather than just reaffirming the vote from more than four years ago, the council could take the opportunity to take a closer look at the city charter now.
The motion was moved to a council subcommittee on conference for further discussion.
“As you will recall, from June 2020 through January 2021, the City Council conducted a thorough review of the Charter as required by the Charter’s mandate to undertake such a review every ten years, in each year ending in zero,” state Maltez in a letter to the council. “Throughout this process, the Council held multiple meetings and public hearings to examine the Charter’s provisions, receive community input, and consider recommendations for improvement.”
Following that process, the council voted in October of 2021 to approve a set of proposed charter amendments and submit them for consideration by the state legislature.
“Recently, we were notified that, unfortunately, the proposed Charter amendments were not adopted by both branches of the Legislature and signed by the Governor prior to the end of the legislative session,” stated Maltez. “As a result, the legislation must now be resubmitted in order to proceed.”
To do so, Maltez said the council must take a new vote reaffirming the action it previously took, and that a new public hearing is not required prior to the reaffirmation vote.
“I think the direction for this is not just to reaffirm what we did, but to reconvene the charter review,” said District 1 Councilor Todd Taylor. “I think that there are a lot of problems that could really be solved.”
Taylor said that a new review would be a lot of work, but that he would volunteer to be on a new charter review board.
“I think it is worth another go-around to try to tackle some of these problems that we have that couldn’t get done last time because of the really combative nature of where the city council was four years ago,” said Taylor.
Councilor-at-Large Roberto Jimenez-Rivera said he believed it would be best to see if the council could get an updated charter review moved through the legislature.
“Councilor Taylor is not the only one who has expressed wanting to look at the charter again, I think many of us want this to happen,” said Jimenez-Rivera. “I agree, and I think it is worth the conversation of whether we just want to move it forward or actually stop and review the whole thing and do it again.”
District 8 Councilor Calvin T. Brown said he had legal questions about whether the city could review the charter prior to the 10-year time frame, but said he wouldn’t be against it if there was a legal opinion permitting it.