Public Comment: Advice for Getting the Charter Review off to a Good Start

The following public comment was submitted to the Charter Review Committee, following their meeting on September 19, 2024,

My name is Darcy DuMont. I live in District 3. These are my comments on the first meeting of the Charter Review Committee on September 19, 2024 and my advice to you is as a resident and as a former Town Councilor and advocate of public participation, transparency, and democracy. 

I want to thank the members of the Charter Review Committee for offering to serve. It’s a big responsibility.

Temporary Chair
Thanks to those members who suggested electing a temporary chair. Most members were meeting each other for the first time so it didn’t make sense to elect a permanent chair at the first meeting. Voting in your third meeting will give you time to know each other a bit. Thanks to Julian Hynes for graciously agreeing to be temporary chair and Andy Churchill temporary vice chair.

I hope that the committee members understand that they are there to represent the residents of Amherst. Your job is to look at how our government can be improved. 

Basic Principles Needed
Agreeing on basic principles you are advocating to improve will help. I am not speaking here for the League of Women Voters, but their principles of good government are great: Public Participation (Democracy), Accountability, Transparency, Checks and Balances, Diversity, Efficiency, and Honesty and Non-Corruptibility. I suggest discussing principles soon.

Accessibility of Meetings to the Public
Thank you for finding a meeting time that is more accessible to residents than 8 a.m. (6 p.m. on alternate Thursdays – Next meeting October 10). Now consider modeling other access to residents. Public comment at the beginning of meetings is better than at the end. Both beginning and end would be even better. 

Implementing a web page and Facebook page would be excellent, with a place where the public can access your packets and resources easily.

Opening up Zoom so that faces can be seen, if only when they give comments, is totally doable. Better to see all, as Northampton City Council does. There are ways to avoid Zoom bombing.

The suggestion of surveying the public is a great one. I hope you do so. 

Please don’t refer to any members of the public as “the usual suspects”. It is disrespectful and suggests you are not open to listening to all views.

Please encourage members not to dominate discussion. 

Open Meeting Law Restrictions
Despite town warnings, Open Meeting Law (OML) doesn’t prevent members of resident committees from discussions with less than a quorum of committee members. That would be up to three others for this committee. One example of when you might want to talk to other members is if you are planning to bring a motion and need a second or want to find out if there is some support for it. Or if you want to debrief with up to three others after a meeting – especially if you are new to the process and want things explained. That is not skirting the OML. The OML assumes that small numbers will need to confer about topics for one reason or another. It is often not in the Town Manager’s interest for residents to do this but they have the right to. 

Direction by the Staff Liaison / Scope of Review
The staff liaison, who is also Clerk of the Council, was very helpful in your first meeting. Members should be aware though that she is liaison to the Town Manager, answers to him and represents his interests. Members of the Charter Review Committee represent the residents. So if a staff liaison is directive, the committee may need to rein her in because you are the deciders. This is difficult because we love our staff.

The committee discussed getting a legal opinion about their scope of review under state law. I’m guessing that there is already agreement within the committee that you have a broad scope of review based on the data shared about what other Massachusetts towns are doing. Though the state law requires additional action by the Town Council to change the form of government, enact term limits, etc., it doesn’t prevent the Charter Review Committee from taking up any topics and making recommendations to the council about them. Your committee charge leaves the scope of review wide open too. I suggest you ask members if they agree with that statement. If so, you may be able to avoid paying for legal advice for that opinion and will be able to get into your work sooner. 

If the committee does end up deciding to get a legal opinion on the scope of review, I hope you will decide on a neutral one.

Get a Consultant Soon
The council assumes that the Charter Review Committee will need to be assisted by a consultant. Getting one on board to organize your work soon is important. The Commission chose the Collins Center as its major consultant and they started work six months into the process. Good to get one to assist much sooner than that.

Again, thank you for your time and commitment to this important work.

Darcy DuMont is a former town councilor and sponsor of the legislation creating the Amherst Energy and Climate Action Committee. She is a founding member of Zero Waste Amherst, Local Energy Advocates of Western MA, and the Amherst Climate Justice Alliance and a non-voting member of Valley Green Energy Working Group. She can be contacted at dumint140@gmail.com.