SAUGUS — Will the third time be the charm for charter change in town?
That’s what Board of Selectmen Chair Anthony Cogliano is hoping as he leads the charge for Saugus to become a city, as two previous efforts to do so — one in 1983 and another in 2009 — both failed.
While both charters were defeated, they represent radically different approaches to governance. In fact, nearly the only similarity between the two documents is they would have resulted in the town becoming a city. The distinction, according to the Division of Local Services, lies not in whether or not the community has an elected mayor or city council but in “the presence of a city or town council as the alternative legislative body to a Town Meeting.”
The effort to create a charter commission in 1981 was led primarily by a group of three residents, Vincent Cicolini, Christie Ciampa Jr., and Bill Stewart. All three were eventually elected to the nine-member charter commission formed in November of that year, with Cicolini serving as chair and Stewart serving as vice chair. According to Stewart, he, Cicolini, and Ciampa sought to create the commission with the explicit goal of amending the town’s charter in order to become a city in mind.
“The group of us thought that the town wasn’t really good enough as a town and that we had reached a point where we were really a city,” Stewart said. “The idea of a town just didn’t fit into Saugus.”
One of the key facets of government Stewart and company sought to amend was the lack of accountability faced by the town manager.
“All he had to do was have two people backing him at a time and he was safe no matter what he did,” Stewart said, citing the fact that a town manager can only be fired by a vote of four of five members of the Board of Selectmen. “We thought that wasn’t a really good situation. A better situation was a mayor, where if the people didn’t like what he was doing he could be thrown out of office.”
The document the commission produced over a year after it was formed, in 1983, reflects those beliefs.
Under the charter proposed by that commission, Saugus would have an elected chief executive and a 15-member town council, with one councilor to be elected from each of the town’s ten precincts and five at-large councilors to be elected. That structure would have essentially combined Town Meeting, where each precinct is represented, with the Board of Selectmen, which features five members representing the entire town.
The chief executive, called the “town executive,” would have been elected by residents every two years, and much like the town manager, would have made appointments and been responsible for “the procurement of equipment, supplies, and services, and to be responsible for the repair and maintenance of town buildings.” The town executive would have also had veto power over legislation passed by the town council, with the council able to override that veto by a two-thirds vote.
But, the commission was sharply divided over the best course of action, with the charter put before voters passing by only a 5-4 margin. That division played out at the polls, where, according to Stewart, voters rejected the new charter by a 53-47 margin.
Stewart, a Town Meeting member for five decades, said he believed the charter was rejected because of Saugus’s conservative nature, and the fact that many residents were resistant to the idea of change.
“Trying to do anything in town that was different was against the rules but we tried,” he said.
The commission that convened decades later, in 2007, also sought reform, but did not go nearly as far in doing so. That commission was chaired by Precinct 10 Town Meeting member Peter Manoogian, a former member of the Board of Selectmen, with the idea of charter change arising due to the declining financial state of the town.
“We were on the verge of receivership,” said Manoogian, who initiated the process to obtain the necessary signatures for the question of creating a charter commission to appear on the ballot.
Under the charter produced by that commission, the 50-member Town Meeting would have given way to a 27-member Town Assembly, with two members elected from each precinct, six at-large members, and an assembly president selected in a town-wide election.
Other changes included the renaming of the Board of Selectmen to the Select Board, where members would serve three-year non-concurrent terms, as opposed to the two-year concurrent terms members serve under the town’s current charter. The board’s chair would have been elected in a separate election, as opposed to the top vote-getter becoming chair.
The charter also called for the creation of a licensing board to oversee license renewals, traditionally a responsibility of the Selectmen, though the Selectmen would have been responsible for appointing the members of the licensing board.
However, the proposed charter would not have called for the election of a mayor, instead leaving in place the town manager post.
“We did not, at that time, want a mayor because we recognized that you needed somebody that had proper training and qualifications to manage the day-to-day operations of the town,” he said, citing the fact that Framingham, which recently made the switch from town to city, has a chief operating officer serving alongside its elected mayor that Manoogian said essentially acts as a town manager/administrator. To that point, Marblehead Town Administrator Thatcher Kezer served in the role for more than three years.
The charter, which won unanimous approval from the commission, ultimately failed at the polls, a result Manoogian believes was a result of those opposing the change being those affected by it, explaining that the document would have barred town employees from serving on the town assembly, a distinction not currently made for Town Meeting members.
“The people most affected by it are the ones that come out and campaign, the hardest against it. At the end of basically a three-year process, 65 meetings, guess what? Now you have to go out and campaign to get it passed. You have to form an election committee, a ballot question committee, you have to raise money, you have to have a campaign. And we had the vote yes committee and they had the vote no committee, and the vote no committee was the same thing in the ‘70s ‘keep Saugus a town,’” he said. “The concept of a city has negative connotations, crime, drugs, homelessness, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.”
Stewart and Manoogian offered differing views on the current effort spearheaded by Cogliano.
“It was the same way 40 years ago, we should’ve been a city then and we should be a city now,” said Stewart. “Saugus is changing, slowly but surely. Eventually, it’s going to happen.”
Manoogian, on the other hand, said he didn’t see the need for overhauling the current system of government, as the town isn’t facing the kinds of issues it was when he led the charter commission two decades ago.
“I guess I’d like to know what’s the issue?” he said. “Other than one person wanting to take over the government of the town for their own interests, what’s the issue here? What’s wrong?”
