It would be easy for anyone reading The Bee’s reports on Newtown’s new Charter Revision Commission to dismiss all the debate over how the town should be run as just so much inside information of no real consequence or relevance to the ordinary citizen. Who cares whether the Planning and Zoning Commission is split into a planning and a zoning commission or which way the selectman-council balance of power tips?

The last time Newtown went through this exercise, the main change in the charter had to do with whether or not the town’s finance director could be dismissed without cause. It was an issue of questionable relevancy to most citizens made even less relevant by the extraordinary expertise and competence of our current finance director, Ben Spragg. There would be ample cause, in our view, to dismiss anyone who dismissed Mr Spragg without cause. But charter revision doesn’t have to be this meaningless.

The thing that attracts many people to Newtown is the way the town looks. We’ve heard so many stories about how people got hooked on the town just by driving down Main Street. The thing that keeps people in Newtown is the cohesion of the community. This community pulls together, whether it is a time of celebration as at the Labor Day Parade, or a time of trouble as when a new playground gets torched in the night. This sense of community makes it very hard for people to move away from Newtown.

There is a lot of community business that has to be taken care of by local government, and it is important for that government to run properly. What good does it do a community to have a great spirit and a big heart if it is neglecting the education of its children, allowing is roads to fall apart, and disregarding public health and safety. One quick way to assess the efficacy of local government is to visit the schools, drive on the back roads, and walk down the street alone at night. By these measures Newtown is doing a pretty good job. But these are only the symptoms of good government. The cause of good government is something else: accountability to the public. That’s where the work of Charter Revision Commission suddenly becomes relevant to everyone.

Local government should be transparent. Its rules and architecture should be simple and direct enough to be quickly understood by every citizen. We don’t need what we see on the federal level, and increasingly on the state level, which is a class of civic cognoscenti who are “in the know” looking out for our best interest as they see it.

Newtown’s phenomenal growth in the past two decades has put stresses on the gears of government as they are currently configured. This time around, significant change may come about as a result of the current review of the town charter. The Charter Revision Commission will be studying charters from towns like Westport, Monroe, Ridgefield, and Trumbull, where the selectman form of government persists. It will also look at charters from Cheshire, Watertown, and Glastonbury, which have gone to a town manager form of government. New power may be vested in the Legislative Council or the first selectman, or both. The town meeting may succumb. As we watch these changes take shape in the commission’s deliberations, we should all ask ourselves this: Are these changes making our local government more accountable or less accountable to the people?

The Charter Revision Commission is off to an excellent start, asserting quickly its independence from the Legislative Council, which tried rather inelegantly at the outset to set the agenda for the charter review. The commission has also made clear that the public’s voice will be the most influential voice in its deliberations. (It has scheduled its first public hearing for November 30 at 8 pm in the lecture hall at Newtown High School.) In the conduct of its own business, the Charter Revision Commission is doing its best to be simple, direct, and transparent. We sincerely hope it is successful in configuring a local government for Newtown that demonstrates this same accountability to the public.