Attorney Steve Mednick addresses Hamden's Legislative Council Monday night.
Just four months after Hamden’s old Legislative Council vetoed a year’s worth of edits to a ten-year-old town charter, a new administration has unanimously appointed seven volunteers to resurrect the revision process.
The Council did that by approving a new Charter Revision Commission (CRC) Monday night, taking the first step needed to follow through on a promise made by Democratic legislators in the last election to give residents a chance to vote for or against significant changes to the town’s primary governmental guide.
That promise was made in response to a saga that ended in August when the Council rejected — with little concrete explanation — an expanded proposed charter that aimed to increase financial transparency, heighten diverse public input, and establish four-year mayoral terms. That rejection preventing the proposed changes from appearing as a referendum question on November’s ballot.
Read more about that final vote, which some supporters of the charter called a politically motivated mistake, in depth here.
Citing hundreds of thousands of dollars lost in legal fees, wasted volunteer labor, and the dropping of potential policies that were pitched by the public during input sessions, an ultimately successful slate of candidate in November’s municipal elections vowed to restore the CRC and put the fate of the ‘21 draft back into the public’s hands.
Four members of the original 15-member CRC who first undertook the once-in-a-decade task are returning to the downsized commission.
Those five veterans include Democrat Frank Dixon, a government contractor and army veteran who served as chair of the commission last year; Democrat Jackie Downing, the director of grantmaking and nonprofit effectiveness for the Community Foundation for Greater New Haven, who acted as vice chair; independent Jay Kaye, a residential and commercial painter who has previously run for both the mayoral office and Legislative Council; and Democrat Sarah Gallagher, a senior director for the National Low Income Housing Coalition who was elected in November to the Town Council.
Three new residents are also joining the commission. They include Democratic Y’Isiah Lopes, the community services coordinator at the Keefe Community Center; Republican Laura Santino, a paralegal who ran in the fall to serve as the District 1 Council representative but lost to her Democratic opposition; and Green Patricia Vener-Saavedra, a local artist and adjunct professor at Quinnipiac who teaches physics and natural science.
Jackie Downing: Ready to resume work.
“The commission has changed less than the Council,” Downing observed in an interview with the Independent. “When they put together the CRC, they put together what I thought was a pretty good, blue ribbon panel,” she said of the first, 15-member group that convened in 2020. “The new Council is more open to moving a document forward to the people. I’m happy about that.”
“The CRC last year put in a lot of time and spent a lot of hours talking to the public, talking to town staff members and politicians,” Downing reflected. “We took in everyone’s voice and put together a document that was the best for the town.
“The Legislative Council not taking it to the people who created this document was … I can’t even think of the word,” Downing continued. “It was demeaning … It was unconscionable not to listen to those voices. If the people of Hamden didn’t like it, they could have voted it down themselves.”
The commission will now work with Attorney Steve Mednick to schedule a date in roughly a week to reap additional public input as the CRC sets out to examine not just one but three charters: The current document, the draft taken by the commission to the Council in late spring, and the final proposed charter shot down in August which included Council revisions.
Downing said that while she “wouldn’t change anything” about how last year’s commission approached the charter revision, she is looking forward to discussing certain ideas and language that were ultimately taken out of the proposed document “as a compromise” with council members who have now been replaced by new representatives.
For example, she pointed to term limits on service across boards and commissions as an important tool for bringing in fresh voices to local government that turned out to be controversial within the ‘20 — ‘21 Council.
“I’m the expert on volunteer boards and services,” noted Downing, who has decades of experience in non-profit administration. “Term limits are best practice.”
She said she plans to represent that suggestion to the new and returning commissioners as well as the public to re-gauge their opinions.
Downing said this abbreviated process offers an important “chance to go back and make a lot of changes.”
Term limits are just one of several topics, Downing said, “That are worth revisiting.”