Charter Revision Commission Chairman Jeff Capeci will consider it a success if a planned public hearing on the current revision — which includes a proposal to eliminate town meetings — will draw more public response than those poorly attended gatherings where millions of dollars is typically authorized by a handful of residents.

While not officially slated yet, Mr Capeci said he expects that hearing will occur ahead of a regular Legislative Council meeting on July 15.

This week, the charter revision official, who is also the former council chairman, said his panel’s work is nearing completion after more than a year working toward the goal of making the community’s constitutional document more easily readable and “user-friendly” for Newtown citizens.

“We’ve basically reorganized the whole document,” he explained. Mr Capeci said while numerous revisions to the charter have occurred since it was first drafted in 1972 by current commission Vice -Chair Robert Hall, many of those revisions incorporated elements of language or paraphrased language already scripted in the document.

Part of the current commission’s challenge was to take all those references and consolidate them into a single location, and then referencing that single passage at each subsequent point where it may come up in subsequent passages.

“We were trying to eliminate any shades of difference across the various entries,” Mr Capeci said. “And we worked to understand any conflicting language or difference in interpretation. Basically, we looked at each passage and tried to clarify what it means.”

Mr Capeci said he believes that if those organizational and “housekeeping” revisions are accepted by the council — the commission’s charging body — and then by voters on the ballot November 2, that the town charter will be easier to use and understand because of the commissioners new suggested layout.

He said much of the work going into both significant and administrative revisions happened in committee. The current commission worked differently that a number of previous charter panels, which opted to handle most of the deliberations and decisionmaking as a full commission, versus in break-out groups.

“Now we have one document containing all the proposed changes,” he said. The commission was planning to do a final run through of proposed changes, and to perform final “cleanup” during a meeting set after this week’s edition of The Bee went to print June 25.

The commission plans to complete that work and recommend sending the finished product for legal review Tuesday, June 30.

“You can never really finish editing, but the end of our time allotment is near,” he said. “We are obliged to keep within a schedule that will permit enough time for all the other necessary discussion, legal reviews, and hearings to be completed at the council level, and for the proposals to go to the Secretary of the State’s Office for review and approval.”

This story has been updated to reflect the correct date of the commission's final meeting on Tuesday, June 30 - not Thursday July, 2 as previously reported.