NEW BEDFORD — From the start of this hot summer, Catherine Adamowicz and Paul Hankins have pursued a citizen’s crusade as they staked out supermarkets and farmers markets, seeking petition signatures for a November referendum setting term limits for the New Bedford City Council. They each worked at it about 32 hours a week, gathered some 2,700 signatures and were well on their way to meeting their goal of 3,100 by September.
Now the effort crashes into hard information: they’ve been on the wrong track from the start. The signatures may be useful as reflection of public opinion, but nothing more.
“I’m disgusted,” said Adamowicz, a retired Bristol Community College English professor.
She was on the second floor at City Hall with Hankins and their lawyer, John Zajac, on Thursday afternoon, minutes after meeting for an hour with City Solicitor Eric Jaikes, who answered the questions about changing the city charter that the two citizens had been seeking for weeks. All that time they were sitting out in the heat, filling one petition sheet after another, doing much better than many people expected, but laboring under a misunderstanding of the state law governing city charters.
“They were off track from the start because of lack of information and misinformation,” said Zajac, of Taunton, whom Adamowicz and Hankins had consulted on the wording of their petition, but not on the right way to establish council term limits. They thought they had that part figured out and did not ask Zajac about it, Adamowicz and Hankins said.
Jaikes has declined several requests to talk about this subject with a reporter, but Adamowicz, Hankins and Zajac said he told them their petition forms were not worded correctly, and they were following the wrong procedure to try to change the city charter to set term limits.
Zajac said Jaikes advised that the petitions should have included language making clear to signers that they should not put their name to more than one petition for this purpose.
They had thought the project was straightforward enough, if demanding of time and energy: get 3,100 signatures of registered voters to put the question on the November ballot, campaign for the question, get a majority vote. And that would be that, capping at four the number of terms future councilors — it would not apply to current councilors — could serve consecutively without taking a break of at least one two-year election cycle before running again.
So it seemed in the spring, when Adamowicz and Hankins started preparing the petition drive.
As it turns out, under state law both of the two possible remaining routes to term limits are more procedurally complicated. One seems politically implausible.
One way would require 9,000 petition signatures, electing a nine-member charter commission, and would take two election cycles. Voters in one election would be asked to form the commission and elect commissioners, voters in the next would consider approving the commission report making the charter change.
The other approach would bypass the petition process entirely by appealing to the mayor and the council to support the move, then call for state legislation to approve the change.
Right, that second approach would require the 11-member council to vote to set term limits for future council members, if not themselves. The move might require a supermajority of eight votes, but that part is not clear.
“My largest complaint is why wasn’t this told to me in May,” said Adamowicz.
She said that in the spring she talked with Manny DeBrito, head of the Board of Election Commissioners, about how to proceed. The two offer different takes on their early conversations.
In Adamowicz’s version, DeBrito said they could model their effort on the successful citizens’ campaign in 2017 to change the mayor’s term in office from two to four years. That would mean gathering petition signatures to equal 5% of the registered voters in the previous city election (about 3,100 this year) and getting the question on the ballot.
In DeBrito’s version, he suggested the 2017 campaign as an example, but never conclusively told her that was the way to go. He said he told her that he would run this by the city solicitor, who would have the final say on how such an effort could proceed.
“I said ‘I’m not a lawyer,’” DeBrito said. He said he first brought the question to the solicitor’s office in May, but not to Jaikes directly.
The 2017 bid was conducted under a state law spelling out how cities could shift to a four-year mayoral term, but only that. Not for any other change. That was not clear to Adamowicz in the spring.
After talking with DeBrito, Adamowicz said she spoke with Rick Kidder, the chief operating officer of One SouthCoast Chamber and one of the leaders of the 2017 effort. From there she was working with the understanding that her campaign could follow the outlines of the earlier pursuit, which successfully launched the four-year mayoral term, starting in 2019.
Mayor Jon Mitchell, who was not part of that effort, won his first four-year term that year and this year is seeking a second. He served four two-year terms before the change.
In late June, Adamowicz and DeBrito talked again, this time after DeBrito had started doing some research of his own on the question. He contacted the office of the Secretary of the Commonwealth, which sent him a 10-page document on state law governing charters. He said that’s when he started getting a sense that Adamowicz’s project could be more complicated than the campaign to change the mayor’s term.
Both Adamowicz and DeBrito offer similar accounts of how they spoke about these concerns.
DeBrito said he passed along to Adamowicz the document he had received from the Secretary of the Commonwealth, and instructions about the petition language. Since then, DeBrito in interviews has leaned more toward thinking the charter commission approach was probably right, but he was continuing to seek a clear answer from the city solicitor.
A spokeswoman for the Secretary of the Commonwealth, Debra O’Malley, confirmed that the city solicitor would have the last word on which charter process would apply.
Adamowicz, whose academic concentration was American literature, has experienced a tough lesson in the workings of city government — the sort of frustrations that spurred the petition drive in the first place.
It started in December and January, as the council amended and adopted a Mitchell administration plan to overhaul the pay schedule for about 250 mostly management and specialized employees.
The administration’s proposal raised most salaries by 5% to 10% in hopes of keeping pace with other cities and towns competing for municipal professionals in a tight job market. The council amended that plan in December to include a handful of increases between 20% and 50%.
Adamowicz was outraged, and she started paying more attention to council proceedings. At the meeting in January in which the council was to vote on final approval of the plan, she was handing out flyers before the session began, protesting the proposal to a crowd of people who had gathered in council chambers.
Ultimately, council members, having heard from many unhappy constituents, decided to limit the damage by capping the highest pay raises at 25%.
That did not go far enough, Adamowicz thought. She wondered what the whole episode said about the council. The decisions seemed out of touch, she said, in a city with a large population making working-class incomes.
“I am and always have been in favor of term limits, from the local level to the Supreme Court, if we could,” Adamowicz said in late June, as she sat behind her table set with her petitions in front of Shaw’s supermarket on State Road in Dartmouth. Without mentioning names, she said the council seemed to be dominated by certain long-serving members.
“I don’t think that promotes fresh ideas,” she said, referring to unlimited terms. “I don’t think that makes it comfortable for new people coming in to voice their ideas,” and she wondered if entrenched incumbents discourage more people from running for office.
That was just days into the petition drive, and Adamowicz and Hankins, retired from his business selling pet supplies and providing training and day care for dogs, were being told by many people that they’d have a tough time getting the 3,100 signatures they thought at the time would suffice.
At the moment they’re re-thinking options, but it seems quite unlikely that anything could be done for the November election. The signatures they have might be presented to councilors and the mayor to encourage them to support a “special act” of the Legislature to establish term limits, but otherwise they would have to be tossed out.
Both citizens said they feel they were misled by public officials. They said they harbor suspicions about why the law was not explained until they were close to getting the signatures they first thought they needed.
“We, as citizens of the United States,” Adamowicz said, “have been denied the right guaranteed within the first amendment of the U.S. Constitution ‘’to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.’”
Email Arthur Hirsch at ahirsch@newbedfordlight.org.
Thank you to our sponsors
Founding benefactors: Joan and Irwin Jacobs fund of the Jewish Community Foundation, Mary and Jim Ottaway
Learn more about our community of individual donors
For questions about donations, contact Chrystal Walsh, director of advancement, at cwalsh@newbedfordlight.org.
For questions about sponsoring The Light, contact Peter Andrews, director of business development and community engagement, at pandrews@newbedfordlight.org.