My name is Greg Nadeau and I am serving as a resident representative on the Mayor’s Charter Advisory Committee. This committee will spend 6 months developing recommendations to change the city’s charter (base constitution). All changes would need to be ratified by the Aldermen, then Legislature, then voters.
One of the questions that is being considered is the structure of the Board of Aldermen.
I would be interested if anyone on this service has had experiences with our current Alderman structure that suggest improvements to the structure (at-large vs ward, terms, committees, public participation, etc).
g.
Posted in Government Reform
August 5th, 2008 at 9:40 pm
I kind of like the current structure of the board, but can we call them something else?
August 6th, 2008 at 6:50 am
None of your charts describe the election and powers of School Committees, which are, I am led to believe, the “critical” question before your commission: will the School Committee be elected or appointed? will it remain by Ward and at-large or city-wide? will it - or can it - gain more program or budget power, or lose anything from the very few authorized decisions it has which are to appoint the Superintendent and to prepare the budget for the City Council??
Beyond that concern, there are other problems with the attached. Critical to any “reform” of the Charter is to engage more - not less - participation, yet none of your data describe turnover, competitive races, and/or parties or advocacy issues reflected in the current spectrum of Council/Board of Aldermen arrangements. If you do have access to DHCD for comparative data, which these charts suggest, I strongly suggest it is this issue of participation/voting/turnover which is critical, and that you and your Committee need, before reviewing arbitrary charter structural decisions, some data on percent voting in recent elections for which formula, where, and over what kinds of issues.
If you need it, my college roommate heads the City Planning department at UC Berkeley, which generates most of the city managers in California, where that is the more or less standard structure. He has both the graduate student capacity and the interest available to mobilize some online research to address these questions which I have yet to see from places like KSG, where participation is less a concern than streamlined decision making. Without a careful consideration of participation - both rates, structures, strategy and purpose - I can guarantee there will be little support for your Commission’s findings.
August 6th, 2008 at 6:56 am
There has also been some discussion about the value of PR, as it’s practiced in Cambridge, in re-structuring city government. That discussion - in one of the PDS Yahoo newsgroups - led to my observation:
The Cambridge system also prohibits single issue candidates, who may not have come from a CCA or Independent Coalition, as when a student from MIT won in the first count and failed to get enough transfers from the adversaries committed to keeping students off the Council. The Cambridge system blends, rather than nourishes, exceptional candidates, and thereby blands the Council’s decisions, in spite of Laini Guanier’s papers and arguments (noted here, http://www.law.harvard.edu/faculty/directory/facdir.php?id=24). There ARE some cities that have PR and an elected Mayor, or some other independent Manager system, but I’ve no idea what their participation rates are in elections, nor how specific minorities achieve representation in those systems.
At one point, for example, PR was a means of getting minority voices on the Council - Saundra was the best of cases. Yet currently and for the past few years, PR has kept smaller minorities - immigrants, students, and business representatives - OFF the council because their constituencies were neither large enough, organized enough, or, more properly, not organized in the “right” way to REQUIRE the coalitions to embrace them, and since those same coalitions were quite happy with the status quo.
PR won’t work here, and probably does not work very well in Cambridge, any longer.
August 6th, 2008 at 11:19 am
Please see Somerville for IRV for our recommendation that we use Instant Runoff Voting for all single-winner offices in Somerville and Choice Voting for all at-large offices. This would allow us to eliminate preliminary elections with a single cheaper and fairer election in which voters rank the candidates in order of preference.