By Steve Decosta
sdecosta@s-t.com
February 05, 2010 12:00 AM

WAREHAM — The Wareham Charter Review Committee did more than just review the town's home rule charter.

It decided to throw the entire, 37-page book out and start again.

The committee's proposal to replace Wareham's 270-year-old town meeting form of government with an elected mayor and 11-member town council will get its first airing at a public forum from 1 to 3 p.m. Saturday at the Wareham Middle School.

The committee could have gone line by line through the town's charter, looking for ways to tweak the document, which was enacted in 1977 and has been reviewed once every decade since then. But, Chairman Alan Slavin said, "When we first got together, it was pretty clear that all nine people (on the committee) felt the charter was broken and needed to be replaced.

"We didn't think it was so much a problem with the personnel running the town as the way the charter was telling them to run it," Slavin said.
That feeling stemmed from several "flaws and disturbing consequences of our present system," the committee wrote, primarily:

The inefficiency and ineffectiveness of Town Meeting.

With only two regular Town Meetings per year and an extended process to set up the warrant, "difficulties cannot be addressed in a timely way, leaving more and more decisions in the hands of the town administrator," the committee wrote in one of its frequent briefings on the town's Web site.

In addition, "Although our legislative branch is supposedly the most representational form of government, each person having one vote, only 1 percent to 2 percent of Wareham's registered voters show up regularly at Town Meeting," the committee wrote. "This allows special interest groups to manipulate the town meeting which can, and sometimes does, result in a vote that is not in the best interests of the town and its residents."

The longtime confusion about overall and day-to-day administration.

"The Board of Selectmen, Wareham's executive branch, was elected by ballot by the town at large, and citizens approach them for remedy of their complaints, but conflict and confusion arise because the BOS is constrained (by the charter) from handling day-to-day affairs," the committee wrote.

"We saw that our town administrator, also a part of the executive branch but NOT elected by the voters, has tremendous powers in the management of the town; although the charter demands that he be accountable to the Board of Selectmen, they are part-time executors, so overworked that they are unable to exercise timely supervision and remedies lag behind problems."

A mayor-council form of government, with six councilors representing individual precincts and five elected at large, addresses both those critical issues, the committee concluded.

"It's not a perfect system, but we think the town can run better with it," Slavin said.

The Charter Review Committee chose to pursue a new charter as a special acts procedure. The document, if approved at Town Meeting, would need to be ratified by the state Legislature first, and then by Wareham voters in a binding townwide ballot. That process would take about a year.

And, Slavin said, the committee has options if voters reject the proposed change at this year's Town Meeting.

"This is only a proposal," he said. "We have a backup plan. If people don't like this, we can go back through our existing charter and discuss it with everybody and ask them what isn't working and what we could do differently. Then we could go ahead and do what we can do to fix it."

Saturday's meeting will be what Slavin called "informational," featuring representatives of four towns — Plymouth, Barnstable, Braintree and Newburyport, — that have changed their government or are in the process of doing so.

A second forum, scheduled for Feb. 20, could be more contentious, Slavin said. "We're not going to set any agenda. We're going to let people ask any question they want."

A draft of the proposed new charter is available on the town's Web site. Follow the links to "Boards & Commissions," then "Charter Review Committee."