East Longmeadow charter review petition committee reaches signature goal

Date: 1/22/2015

EAST LONGMEADOW – The committee spearheading a petition calling for the formation of a Charter Commission to review other forms of government recently reached its goal of obtaining 1,700 signatures and was certified by the town. 

Sidney Starks, co-chair of the committee, said the petition requires 1,686 or more signatures, which represents 15 percent of the registered voting population.

“The main thing that we want to stress is that the Charter Commission has nothing to do with cable,” he added. “It’s to look at the current form of government. It’s to determine whether we can tweak it, to make it better, to stabilize it some, [or to] enhance.”

Now that the petition has been certified, the next step involves residents voting at the Annual Town Election ballot on whether to develop a Charter Commission, Starks stated.

If the Charter Commission is approved, nine candidates with the most votes would be elected and examine all possible forms of government within the following 18 months, he added. Another vote would likely take place in 2016 regarding either the town’s form of government changing or remaining the same.

At least 50 signatures are needed for an individual to run for the Charter Commission, he noted.

“The commission would be charged with looking at various forms of government,” Starks said. “The one thing that I think they would bring forward is to make the town charter so that we do have more of a say in what we do. We always bring up the fact that [if] you have someone in office, you can’t get rid of him [or her] unless it’s a general election.”

The town currently does not have a charter, he noted. The town often adopts state bylaws.

“A lot of the work has already been done by various communities throughout the Commonwealth,” Starks said. “It’s been about 10 years since Longmeadow changed their form of government and I stress with that; any form of government is only as good as the people you put in office.”

The eight-member citizen organized committee started meeting in March 2014 and the first event where they collected signatures was during the April 2014 elections, Raymond Miller, a committee member who was on the Charter Commission nearly a decade ago when the town previously reviewed its form of government, explained.

“I would certainly hope that the [commission] would do a very thorough check, talking with other towns about some of the changes that they have made – what they’ve liked, what they don’t like, what works, what doesn’t work,” he said.

Miller added, “You don’t have to reinvent the wheel,” when it comes to determining a form of government. Other communities the commission could contact could be West Springfield or Agawam, both of which changed to mayoral forms of government more than a decade ago.

“The three primary areas we’re going to be looking at [include] keeping it the same, town manager, or mayoral form of government,” Starks said. “Now within each of those three forms you can always tweak. We could keep it the same and go to five selectmen.”