Vote No on the Charter

It’s coming up on November 5th, Election Day, and one of the most important issues is the vote on the charter revision questions for Southington. The proposed changes will remove citizen involvement in our fire and police commissions. The changes to the finance process make it easier to get approval for larger expenditures that are not budgeted and avoid our elected Board of Finance.

Why should you vote “NO”? First of all there has been no demonstrated need to change our charter. The most significant part of our charter, the budget process, doesn’t change and the day to day operation of the two public safety departments will not change. So why is there a need for a change? I can see none unless you want to consider that the town manager would have the total authority to hire the next chief without any input from anyone. When does one mind working on an issue produce a better outcome than five- almost never. So again I ask, why change?

If we look closely at the process that brought the questions to the ballot we see that only testimony that supported a change was heard. Not one opposing view was sought unless you consider my opposition. It appears the die was cast before the process began.

Citizen involvement has always been a part of Southington’s government since the council-manager charter was adopted.  It was a compromise between a pure council-manager form (and there is none in the state) and a mayor. We wanted to have a degree of professionalism without leaving the people out of the process. This past Republican administration has started down the path of giving all the authority to one person and removing binding citizen input from the process. They want to install advisory panels that can and will be ignored.