Continuing Appeal for Action on Creating a Charter Review Study Group

I just sent the following email to each member of City Council:

It’s been almost two months since I last sent a plea by email to City Council for action and almost four months since the Charter Review Commission wrapped up its business for 2017. How difficult could it be to set up a Charter Review Study Group? Convening a group of people to meet with the sole purpose of studying an issue doesn’t have to cost anything, so what is the hold-up? What are we afraid of? It’s not as if this issue pondering nonpartisan elections has randomly emerged this year with a demand for further study. Instead, it has had a repeated pattern of surfacing every five years when the Charter is up for review and it appears that every time it has been debated the dominating view coming out is that a couple months is not a sufficient amount of time to consider such.

For that reason, the consensus of the five members you chose to represent the city in reviewing our Charter is that it would be in the best interest of the city to – once and for all – establish a Charter Review Study Group and - hopefully – put forward a stand-alone proposed amendment to the Charter for consideration by the people of Newark. At the very least, if the Study Group doesn’t conclude that it would be good to propose a change before the next mandated Commission is convened they could forward their findings to the next group of five citizens for them to contemplate and – again, hopefully – craft a workable amendment to the Charter for a vote by the people of Newark.

Literally, the least that you can do as our elected representatives in Newark is to help get the ball rolling on settling this debate for good. Thank you for reading and thank you for giving me the opportunity to serve on the Commission earlier this year.