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4-year terms, on the table at latest charter-review panel.
Hartford and Middletown recently moved from two-year to four-year terms for their mayors and local legislators. Should New Haven do the same?
The Charter Revision Commission considered that question while hearing from representatives of four other Connecticut towns, all of whom spoke in support of longer mayoral stints in office.
Steve Mednick, the lawyer enlisted to guide the charter revision process in New Haven as well as in municipalities across the state, convened a virtual panel last Thursday featuring council members from Hartford, Norwalk, and Middletown, as well as a charter commission member from Hamden.
The meeting marked the latest in the city’s once-a-decade process of considering changes to the city’s foundational governing document. The commission will meet multiple times per month until mid-May, when it plans to send a report to the Board of Alders to review and vote on. The alders will then finalize a question, or multiple questions, about alterations to the charter that will appear on voters’ ballots in November.
As New Haven considers whether to double the length of its two-year terms for alder and mayor, the panelists on Thursday offered snapshots of how other towns and cities have tackled the question.
Three of the four panelists live in towns with four-year mayoral terms, with the fourth — from Norwalk — living in a town considering going to four-year mayoral terms. All four panelists offered arguments in favor of such a system.
Jackie Downing, who served on both of Hamden’s recent charter revision commissions, explained that the commission decided to extend the mayor’s term from two to four years in order to promote “professionalism” in the role.
Downing offered the argument that a four-year mayoral term offers new mayors more time to devote to governing, rather than constantly running for re-election — a motivation that the Elicker administration echoed at an earlier charter commission meeting. “The first year you’re in office, you’re learning, you’re ramping up the curve. You’re just in the middle of understanding how to be a mayor, when all of a sudden you have to start again. The second year is really a time when the mayor is thinking about a reelection campaign,” Downing explained.
Thomas Livingston, who serves on Norwalk’s Common Council, echoed this sentiment. Norwalk, which currently has two-year council and mayor terms, is currently considering whether to extend the mayor’s term only to four years. “We have found that two years is really not enough for a mayor these days to get anything done,” Livingston said.
Another advantage of a four-year mayoral term, according to Downing, is the potential to attract stronger candidates. “I might not leave a cushy corporate job for a two-year appointment. I might consider it more if it was a four-year job,” she said.
At the same time, Hamden elected to leave council members’ terms at two years. Downing explained, “We thought it was a good check and balance.”
Livingston agreed that a two-year legislator term builds in accountability for a longer mayor’s term. “The public would be able to bring in new council members if they weren’t happy with the direction of the city,” he said. “Having a two-year term for the council ensures that we do have a necessary check on the mayor if we need one.”
One potential challenge of this approach, Livingston suggested, is the task of generating turnout on non-mayoral elections.
“One of our concerns is, if we put the mayor on a four-year cycle, what happens on those off years? How do we get people to come off and vote? It’s always hard to have municipal elections and this will make it harder,” he said. “That said, we think the benefit outweighs” that concern.
Westville/Amity Alder and Charter Revision Commission Vice-Chair Richard Furlow argued that turnout may not be a concern in New Haven. “Over the eight years [and four elections] that I’ve ran as an alder, I’ve always exceeded the votes for the mayor, regardless of who the mayor is. It is the aldermen who turn out the votes,” he said.
Livingston offered another perspective. As a council member in Norwalk, he said, “I do get more votes than the mayor does, but what I find is that the apparatus around the mayor’s election brings attention to the election itself. … He does get a lot more enthusiasm generated about the whole process.”
Middletown, meanwhile, recently voted to create four-year terms for both town council members and the mayor, both of which previously held two-year terms.
Board of Alders President Tyisha Walker-Myers tasked New Haven’s commission with reviewing a similar proposal to create four-year terms for both the mayor and alders.
Middletown Council Majority Leader Gene Nocera argued on Thursday that an era of virtual meetings has brought increased scrutiny on elected officials of all kinds. “They can’t blend in and grow. They’re expected to be fully informed. And that does take time,” he said. “When you have an influx of [legislators] in and out every two years, that can be problematic given our current situation in government.”
Hartford has employed a similar four-year term system since 2002. As Hartford City Council Majority Leader TJ Clarke II posited, the simultaneous elections for both the mayor and council members (all of whom represent the city as a whole, rather than a specific district) means that the mayoral and council candidates typically run as a slate.
“The mayor is the top of the ticket,” Clarke explained. “Very rarely is someone who’s not on that ticket elected into office.”
In all of the municipalities represented on the panel, the legislative bodies comprise fewer than 13 representatives, some (and in some cases, all) of whom are “at-large,” elected not by a particular neighborhood but by the entire city.
New Haven’s Board of Alders, meanwhile, comprises 30 legislators, each of whom represents a relatively small section of the city comprising just over 4,000 constituents.
Furlow implored his fellow commissioners to keep in mind the differences between New Haven and the other towns represented. “It’s not really apples to apples,” he said, noting that New Haven has a population of about 135,000 — significantly larger than most of the other towns on the panel except for Hartford, which has about 120,000.
If New Haven does indeed implement four-year terms for both mayor and alder, Mednick pointed out that the commission could potentially stagger the elections for those officials, so that every two years, New Haveners would turn out to elect either the mayor or members of the Board of Alders. “In one cycle, you have alders running. In the other cycle you have the mayor running,” Mednick said. “What you don’t get is the relief of having one year where there’s no election.”
Furlow responded that the past several mayors have all served multiple consecutive terms, and that the vast majority of alders have served multiple terms as well. He suggested that municipal elections every two years may not be necessary: “You think about the cost savings.”
Both the mayor and alders are currently serving their second year in a two-year term. Within the past two years, three alders (in wards 9, 21, and 28) resigned prior to the end of the term.