Plymouth Charter Review Committee Proposes Major Reorganization

Committee prepares to present changes at fall town meeting

PLYMOUTH, MA - June 4 - The Charter Review Committee is proposing a significant reorganization of the town charter and developing strategies to present these changes at the upcoming fall town meeting.

The committee plans to present the reorganization as the first article for town meeting approval, followed by 10 to 12 additional articles detailing specific changes.

Committee member Steve Bolotin explained the rationale behind the reorganization: "We really focused on trying to put things in a logical progression so that somebody picking this up for the first time, and looking at that table of contents could find what they were looking for."

The proposed reorganization aims to make the charter more user-friendly and logically structured. To facilitate this, the committee plans to create a document showing the reordered charter with additions and deletions for comparison.

"The first article that we would be presenting would be a request that town meeting reorder our existing charter as proposed without any changes, just reorder the entire document," said Bolotin. This approach would allow town meeting members to compare the current charter with the proposed changes more easily.

Committee member Len Levin outlined the strategy for subsequent articles: "Rather than doing 37 articles and going completely crazy the way we did in 17, the idea was we would do first a simple straightforward administrative one that addressed all of the typographical errors, the commas, the parentheses, the grammatical changes."

The committee estimates that two or three articles may be controversial, but they believe the majority of changes will be straightforward. They plan to encourage town meeting members to segregate out specific items for further discussion if needed.

Cost considerations led the committee to propose presenting the charter changes at the fall town meeting rather than calling for a special town meeting. Committee member Larry Pizer noted, "We looked at the numbers, but it's at least 25 to $35,000 to do a town meeting."

The committee met with town council Kate McKay to discuss presentation strategies. They plan to have two or three more meetings to finalize their proposals and article presentation, aiming to have a draft document ready for review by their next meeting on July 18.

Committee Chair Alan Costello emphasized the importance of thorough review: "I think we should still have at least one meeting where we go through the whole charter, the proposed change charter, make sure everybody's happy with it."

The committee's goal is to present a clear, well-organized set of proposals to town meeting members, allowing for informed discussion and decision-making on the proposed charter changes.