After nearly eight hours of line-by-line scrutiny over the course of two meetings, the Legislative Council completed its administrative review of a draft charter revision during a special meeting October 28. The panel, with several members absent, also held a brief public hearing with no comments offered, and subsequently approved updates to Newtown’s alarm and purchasing ordinances.

Following Wednesday’s meeting, council Chair Mary Ann Jacob had high praise for the charter panel: Chairman Jeff Capeci, Vice Chair Robert Hall, and commissioners Kevin Burns, George Guidera, Tom Long, Eric Paradis, James Ritchie, Dan Wiedemann, and Deborra Zukowski. Ms Jacob said the commissioners worked hard to respond to the charge of making the town’s constitutional document more readable and user-friendly.

“It’s fabulous,” said the council chair. “The final draft was highly conforming to our original charge. It’s readable and has a good flow, so much better than the version we’re working with now.”

Ms Jacob said she believes since the current document is essentially a series of smaller revisions cobbled together into a finished product, it reflects the type of inconsistencies one might expect. But the thorough review and reformatting of the new draft correct virtually all of those inconsistencies.

“For example, in the current document, if a citizen wanted to learn how the budget process works, they would have to read multiple sections to find how each step in the budget process is handled by the various parties and boards that are involved,” she explained. “But the commission has laid out this new document so everything related to the budget process is all in one place, so it’s easy to read and understand.”

Ms Jacob said the two lengthy and meticulous review meetings the council held isolated concerns in three areas: non-substantive administrative changes, more substantive but noncontroversial points, and the small handful of issues that could still inspire significant debate when the council reconvenes to finish its current phase of review at a regular meeting Wednesday, November 4.

The bulk of discussion that evening is expected to center on whether to ask charter commissioners to reconsider the standing 5-2 minority party makeup on the Board of Education, or to codify a 4-3 party split on the local board. The council may also request commissioners scrap a complex and highly detailed section on the acquisition or disposition of public property.

Commission Vice Chairman Robert Hall, who helped create the proposed new language, argued that a detailed step-by-step process for how the town should acquire or dispose of unwanted public property should be codified in the charter. Some council members and town officials, including Director of Planning George Benson and First Selectman Pat Llodra, questioned proposed language that seemed confusing in that chapter and wondered whether such a level of detail belongs in the charter.

Mr Benson, who was in attendance, said the disposition and acquisition of public land happens very infrequently, and the process involves “a level of detail that might not belong in the charter.”

Mr Hall countered that the current charter makes it very difficult to convey public property, and that the proposed step-by-step process detailed in the new charter draft is critical for protecting the town in the future.

Both Mrs Llodra and Ms Jacob suggested the alternative might be to create a very limited reference to disposing and acquiring public land, and to refer to proposed step-by-step details in an ordinance. Mrs Llodra also said that the complexity of language in that one proposed revision goes against the otherwise logical flow and more simplified language of the draft.

Ms Jacob said in many respects the proposed revision is at its most crucial point, because it is more than 95 percent done and done right in her opinion.

“We have to be careful at this point about rejecting certain things because they are interconnected to other elements that may exist in various places throughout the document,” she said. Among those provisions is the elimination of town meetings, which is interconnected to a special appropriations process that is referred to in several other sections of the draft.

She said the November 4 meeting is the last during which the council and charter commissioners can legally confer. At that point, the council may send the commission back with suggested changes to the proposed draft, and the commission must accept or leave those proposed revisions intact.

In other business October 28, the council heard no comment during a public hearing on proposed changes to the local alarm and purchasing ordinances. Following the hearing both of those ordinances were approved with little discussion.

The only minor amendment, which was unanimously approved, clarified a directive that all local commercial buildings would be required to prominently display their numerical addresses using mounted digits at least three inches in height on the building itself or in a highly visible place where police can see them if responding to an alarm call.

“We found that it’s commercial properties that generate the most false alarms, and that it is not as much a problem with [officers responding to] private homes,” Ms Jacob said. “So we made a small change that allows the address signage to be located in a highly visible place, not necessarily just on the building.”