{shortcode-2f086ec99d6efa0a3800d2dd300e17e70be6fb72}

This November, Cambridge voters will ratify or reject a draft of the City’s charter that makes minor changes without altering the core of its 85-year-old council-manager form of government.

The proposed changes to the document come after years of debate among Cambridge residents and government officials regarding the structure of its charter, which serves as the City’s constitution and has not been modified since 1940.

The new draft revokes the mayor’s status as the automatic chair of the School Committee, codifies the Council confirmation power over certain city appointments and financial and election processes, and eliminates the use of gendered language in the charter itself.

The most substantive change in the charter is the selection process for the chair of the School Committee, which historically has been filled by the mayor. In the proposed charter, the chair is elected from the School Committee’s members.

Elliot J. Veloso, the deputy city solicitor, said that many of the changes simply formalize the City’s charter in line with existing practices and state law.

Veloso said the codification also mandates “collaborative processes” developed by the current Council and City Manager Yi-An Huang ’05 for all successive administrations.

Cambridge’s government operates under a Plan E charter — including an elected City Council, which sets legislative goals for the city, and an appointed city manager who acts as the City’s chief executive and works to enact the Council’s priorities.

Concerns around the contentious relationship between the Council and the city manager were the focus of the initial charter review when Cambridge residents approved a ballot measure in 2021 requiring the city to assess its charter every 10 years.

Under the proposed measure, the Cambridge Charter Review Committee began its first review in 2022. But after 18 months of deliberation, the Committee was unable to reach the necessary two-thirds consensus to officially endorse the council-manager form of government or recommend an alternative.

While the Committee made several substantive recommendations common to both forms of government during its final report in Jan. 2024, the draft voters will see in November does not reflect most of the Committee’s key proposals.

The Council voted on each proposed amendment in the months following the Committee’s final report, before officially approving a far less substantive draft of changes to the charter in April.

City Councilor Sumbul Siddiqui said the charter review — and a subsequent 7-2 vote by the Council to maintain the council-manager form of government last December — was a missed opportunity to alter the most fundamental part of Cambridge’s government.

“I think there was this desire to see more of that discussion openly. I think it became kind of well, this is too big of a question to answer at the moment,” Siddiqui, who voted against retaining Cambridge’s existing government structure, said.

Councilor Patricia M. “Patty” Nolan ’80 shared Siddiqui’s sentiments, saying she had hoped for “a more robust discussion” about the city-manager form of government.

Nolan also advocated for other reforms regarding the City’s leadership structure, ranging from changing the mayor’s title to “City Council President” to introducing neighborhood councilors as opposed to solely at-large councilors.

Still, Nolan believes the draft charter is a good step forward.

“I think the advantage is that now that we have this change, it’s substantive, and yet it’s not a radical overhaul,” Nolan said.

— Staff writer Shawn A. Boehmer can be reached at shawn.boehmer@thecrimson.com. Follow him on X @ShawnBoehmer.

— Staff writer Jack B. Reardon can be reached at jack.reardon@thecrimson.com. Follow him on X @JackBReardon.