WESTFIELD – Two City Council committees reviewed a number of edits to the revised City Charter recommended by the state Senate General Counsel Office Monday night.
The council’s Ad hoc Committee on Charter and Rules and the Legislative & Ordinance Committee had submitted its revision of the City Charter to the state Senate for review in December at the suggestion of Attorney Peter Martin, the retired Law Department supervisor hired as a consultant for the charter revision process.
“I was struck by the commitment of the attorneys in Boston,” Ward 4 Councilor Mary O’Connell, chairwoman of the Ad Hoc Charter and Rules Committee, said. “It is heartening, after all the work we put into this, to send it to Boston and get a serious and detailed response. They put a lot of effort into this response.”
“It makes the end game, when we submit the final phase one revision to the legislature, because of their involvement early in the process,” she said, “to have issues and concerns identified early, rather than find out that we were on the wrong trail later in the process.”
The council is taking a two phased approach to the charter revision process, Ward 2 Councilor James E. Brown Jr., chairman of the L&O, said.
The current phase one effort is to bring the City Charter into compliance with existing state and federal laws, then phase 2 will deal with substantive changes to the charter and address terms of office and department structure.
The changes suggested by the Senate counsels is to change the charter language structure from passive to active voice, to make the document gender-neutral.
“Now that we know what issues they are concerned with, when we look that the substantive changes in phase two, we’ll know we have to bring it up to modern language structure,” Brown said.
O’Connell said the two committees voted to send sections of the document pertaining to the Westfield Gas & Electric Department, Municipal Light Board, School Department and School Committee to those departments for review and comment.
“Hopefully, by March, we’ll have a document that we can submit to the (City) Council for its comment and review,” she said.
