Newtown’s charter is returning to the shop for its five-year tune-up. While the Legislative Council and its newly appointed Charter Revision Commission don’t anticipate a major overhaul, some replacement parts are under consideration, perhaps swapping the antiquated and little-used town meeting for a more serviceable referendum apparatus for deciding local issues. The panel’s six new members, each with distinct perspectives and ideas, are eager to get started. The truth is, we really don’t know where this process will lead them. But we have our hopes.

While the charter describes the vehicle of government for Newtown, people, in the end, must steer whatever democratic processes we create in the direction we want to go. For that you need a representative government. Representative governments, however, are easier to come by when a town isn’t split down the middle, as it appeared to be this spring on spending issues. It took three referendums to pass a budget. In times like these, when a town is polarized, the fundamental question becomes: Which half of the electorate should the government represent? We attempt to answer that question with elections.

Unfortunately, when it comes to assessing the will of the people, recent elections in Newtown have been laughable. In 2005, local voters were deprived of actual choices for all of the following “elective” offices: first selectman, Board of Selectmen, town clerk, Board of Finance, Board of Education, Board of Assessment Appeals, Zoning Board of Appeals, Zoning Board of Appeals Alternate, Police Commission, and Board of Managers of Edmond Town Hall. Aside from a contested alternate position on the Planning and Zoning Commission, the only choice voters got was for their district representative on the Legislative Council. All the other positions were filled by the nominating conventions of the town’s two political parties, neither of which represents the largest bloc of local voters who are unaffiliated.

Since no one was up for election, no one felt obligated to justify his or her views on local spending. When ideas, philosophies, and rationales go without challenge in the context of an election campaign, some candidates mistake the silence of an uncontested race as endorsement for their views and their preordained election as a landslide mandate. It is only when their ideas, philosophies, and rationales are put up for a vote in the form of a rejected budget that the mandate is shown for what it is: a phantom.

Fortunately, the tradition of home rule embodied in our town charter affords the people of Newtown the opportunity to change the way candidates are selected for local elective office. We do not have to leave candidate selection solely in the hands of the political parties if that system is not working for us. On the local level, the political ideologies of the Democratic and Republican parties are indistinguishable from each other, a point the parties quickly dispute and almost never disprove.

We challenge the Charter Revision Commission to bring Newtown’s moribund local elections to life again. Do we really need to apportion seats on important boards to political party members when no such privileges are accorded to the much larger population of unaffiliated voters? Perhaps it is time for a truly innovative approach like at-large nominating conventions for all voters, not just the politically affiliated. There may be better strategies we haven’t considered. Bringing real choice back for our local elections will rev up our local government to peak performance faster than anything else the commission has on its agenda this year. Let’s not wait another five years to do it.