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Charter Panel Hears From Rosenthal

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Charter Panel

Hears From Rosenthal

By John Voket

The chairman of Newtown’s Charter Revision Commission hopes his panel will be expeditious in deciding what type of executive leadership will be carried as the revision process moves forward. Al Cramer, CRC chair, told commissioners this week that he expects discussion on the issue to begin over the course of the next few meetings.

“We’re going to have to be dealing with the issue of the chief executive officer,” Mr Cramer said. “Are we going to maintain the first selectman that we have had for 300 years, or are we going to be thinking about a council [town] manager form of government?”

To that end, the commission invited First Selectman Herbert Rosenthal in this week to discuss the duties and responsibilities of his office and the Board of Selectmen. Mr Rosenthal spent nearly two hours in a dialogue with charter commissioners, touching on dozens of points regarding the executive leadership of the community, and the role he and his fellow selectmen play in the process.

The first selectman took the opportunity to offer his opinion on several other aspects of the charter, as well as the Legislative Council’s charge. His first point of focus was on the extreme variety of checks and balances inherent in the existing government structure in Newtown.

“I think we probably have the most layers of checks and balances of any town government except for a Representative Town Meeting and a town manager,” Mr Rosenthal said. “We have a Board of Selectmen, a Board of Finance, a Legislative Council, a town meeting, referendum — most towns don’t have all of those things. They have most of them in some combination, but not all of them.”

Mr Rosenthal then spoke to the effectiveness and bipartisan cooperation he has experienced with the Board of Selectmen going back nearly a decade.

“I think we’re very fortunate that we have good people who always put the town’s best interest first. They’re not there because they are Democrat or Republican, but that hasn’t always been the case,” Mr Rosenthal said, recalling periods where members of the majority party tried to freeze out the minority member by keeping certain pieces of information among themselves.

“I’ve always been fortunate that Joe Bojnowski, who is in the same party as I am, has not asked me to caucus with him — which I could do legally. We could decide everything in caucus and go in to the meeting and do everything we want,” Mr Rosenthal said. “Bill Brimmer, by the same token, has always been a constructive person who only comes up with good ideas, and if he thinks the ideas Joe or I come up with are good, he supports them.”

Mr Rosenthal said he thought the existing structure of the Board of Selectmen has been working well overall for many years. But he relented that the success of any part of local government depends on the personalities involved.

“It works based on the good will of the people currently serving in office. When you look at the council and the Board of Finance powers and all the overlapping duties they have, if they weren’t people interested in working with one another, it could be a disaster,” Mr Rosenthal said. “There could be all kinds of turf issues if you had a couple of people in leadership positions with opposing points of view.”

The first selectman ventured that the current charter mandated government structure probably resulted from revisionists who were wary of putting too much power in any segment of the executive and legislative branches locally. He pointed out Monroe, New Milford, and Trumbull all have single executive leaders and larger councils, and all three communities seem to function well with that mayor/council form of government.

“Selectmen are a vestige of the Colonial days,” Mr Rosenthal said. Saying he was not in favor of a town manager form of government, the first selectman pointed out that a manager was technically only accountable to a bare majority of the council that hires the person in that capacity.

“It becomes difficult when the majority party of the council changes, that person sees their job in jeopardy unless they have a long-term contract. And most of them don’t,” he said. “And in a town with an effective financial director like we have in Newtown, they handle a lot of the same responsibilities a town manager would.”

 Mr Rosenthal told the CRC that he favored expanding the first selectmen’s term to four years, and that he did not see any justification for expanding the Board of Selectmen.

“I think you might get more people willing to serve if they knew they had a longer period on the job,” he said. “There’s a pretty long learning curve, and by the time you get to know what’s going on you are campaigning again [in the current two-year cycle].”

Charter commissioner Guy Howard asked Mr Rosenthal about the management of his time, and what particular duties kept him most occupied.

Mr Rosenthal answered that labor and human resources issues probably keep him most busy, referencing the amount of time he spends dealing with both day-to-day concerns among the several hundred town employees and appointed officers, as well as playing a role in contract planning and negotiations.

He said handling constituent calls and making public appearances on behalf of the town also takes up considerable time, and although the Fairfield Hills facility now comes under the management of an authority, the nonpolicymaking structure of that group still leaves him to handle a substantial amount of work on that front.

“The special act and ordinance that created the authority [stipulates] they have to go to the Board of Selectmen or the council to authorize their spending,” Mr Rosenthal said. “They are really in place to implement the master plan.”

Mr Rosenthal also offered his opinion on the elimination of the town meeting form of government, saying the process might be inherently unfair to individuals opposing certain initiatives.

“The town meeting can be too easily controlled by a relatively small group of people,” he said.

Mr Rosenthal referenced next Wednesday’s upcoming town meeting where voters are expected to endorse more than $400,000 in bonding for a new fire truck.

“I expect there will be less than a dozen people there authorizing almost half a million dollars in spending, and most of them will probably be firefighters who obviously support the spending,” he said.

Commissioner Carolyn Signorelli asked if there were any elements in the charter, which if eliminated, would help government operate more efficiently.

The first selectman replied that some of the steps required to move issues through the governmental system could be streamlined to help things run more efficiently.

“I know checks and balances are important, but to move something like the purchase of a piece of property along could take the Board of Selectmen, Planning and Zoning, the Board of Finance, the council and then a town meeting and possible referendum,” he said. “A lot of people may not be offering us property because they thought it would take so long to be approved and that they would have to come out and answer a lot of questions in a lot of public meetings.”

After some further discussion and Mr Rosenthal’s departure, Mr Cramer distributed packets to the CRC members with details on the specifics of town manager government versus the mayor or first selectman/council system to review as they begin formulating ideas about revisions to that effect.

The CRC is scheduled to meet next Tuesday, between 7 to 9 pm. Acting Legislative Council Chairman Timothy Holian is scheduled to speak about the council’s role and responsibilities in the town government structure.

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