Opinion: Charter Review Committee’s Recommendations Are Deeply Flawed: A Response to Ray LaRaja 

I stand by my criticisms of the Charter Review Process (see here, here,and here), that it included both deeply insufficient outreach and a failed recommendation process. The Charter Review Committee’s final report was not “imperfect” due to garden-variety governmental ineffectiveness as Ray LaRaja implies (see also his comment in the Indy here). It violated the democratic principles under which it should have been operating—the principles of inclusive participation, honesty, and transparency. By failing to do the majority of the planned outreach and by delaying, obscuring, and minimizing the Charter Review, the Town Council and members of the Charter Review Committee violated not only democratic principles but the public trust. We should expect much more. 

Listing all the problems with the process and suggesting what should be different in the 2034 review in no way remedies this review.

Neither LaRaja nor anyone else deny any of the specific facts that I listed about the action and inaction that undermined the Charter Review.  

Lack of Inclusive Participation
For all the time the committee devoted to discussing how to approach outreach (9/24 – 8/25), why was virtually none of the planned outreach done in any meaningful way, especially since there were existing models for such outreach (see, e.g., the 2023 public Charter Review survey (see also here) done by the League of Women Voters, the 2023 public survey on trash, recycling and compost done by Zero Waste Amherst for the town, the town opioid settlement survey, the town Youth DEI Survey and many more. Chair Julian Hynes also provided a model survey form to work from early in the Charter Review process, which could have been used or modified.).

As former Town Councilor Alisa Brewer wrote in a comment (scroll to final comment) to the Charter Review Committee (CRC) on 12/15/25: 

So far, the Charter Review members have facilitated very little. Most critically, over these many months they threw away every opportunity, including those they themselves had planned according to their own Minutes, to actually do authentic outreach in the community, with our lived experiences, instead depending only on an independent LWV Amherst study, generic paid consultants, minimally attended outreach meetings, and a truly weak survey instrument that asked far too broad an audience of stakeholders very generic questions…

As our actual community-elected political leadership, the Town Council has to ask itself: how much more time, and how much weight, do you give the recommendations from a failed outreach process as you work to move our community forward?

Lack of Honesty and Transparency
Was the Charter Review Committee packed with close allies of the Council President and/or Town Manager? Can anyone from the committee produce a recording or the meeting minutes from the retreat and after, when votes on which suggestions to adopt were taken? Can anyone provide the roll call of the votes taken or the sequence of events leading to them? Or the criteria applied to the decisions and the rationales for each of the votes? Can anyone explain why the committee did not discuss the charter for the first nine months of its existence? 

LaRaja suggests that the Charter Review Committee was an independent body of town residents that did its best to evaluate over 200 suggestions and used their best judgment to choose the best among them. But all of the above would indicate to a reasonable person that important criticisms of our current government under the charter received little or no discussion and recommendations for improvement were simply voted down without consideration. 

Some examples of good government-related amendments left out include the LWVA recommendations for: 

• recommitting to ranked choice voting and participatory budgeting, 
• shortening of the lame-duck period as in other towns, 
• mandating public comment at the beginning of all non-special council and committee meetings to make it easier for the public to participate, and 
• requiring that applications for membership on town committees and boards be considered public records, so the council and the public can see who applied and the diversity of the pool).

When Problems Arise, We Should Address Them
The Charter is not required to be reviewed again until 2034, yet there are many glaring problems not addressed by the review committee that need to be addressed if we are to have an effective and responsive democracy in Amherst.

LaRaja says that “stability matters” and that charters are “not living rulebooks to be endlessly rewritten in response to dissatisfaction with particular outcomes.”

But the charter review process happens once every 10 years. This is the time we have to provide a broad review and make important amendments, such as those recommended by the League of Women Voters of Amherst, grounded in Principles of Good Government. The lack of respect given to the League Task Force’s two-year process of research, study, and recommendations by the Charter Review Committee, which, by the way, involved substantial input from more than 400 Amherst residents—is astounding. Note that the League is not mentioned once in the Review Committee’s final report. Councilor Andy Churchill’s (at large)  assertion at the 1/12/26  council meeting that the committee “deeply considered” the League of Women voters’ recommendations is simply not true. Three of us from the LWV Task Force invited ourselves to a meeting of the review committee on May 8 of last year to simply present our recommendations after which the committee took 10 minutes to ask questions. Committee member Churchill said he was irritated that we had taken up their time. He also convinced the committee NOT to add to the list of suggestions the additional 200 comments made by residents on the LWVA survey.

What Does Democracy Require?
I note that one of the League’s findings was that there was widespread dissatisfaction among Amherst residents with government under the Charter and that the review committee did not explicitly consider that alarming finding.

What does democracy require on a municipal level? I would suggest that it includes all League of Women Voters principles of good government, including widespread and inclusive participation, diversity in the community reflected in government, transparency and full disclosure, checks and balance of power among the executive, legislative and administrative branches of government and the electorate, honesty and non-corruptibility in all decision making, efficiency based on professional management and timely decision making, and accountability for political and fiscal decisions. I admit to a strong bias in favor of these principles.

The review committee’s final report emphasizes the need for government efficiency but fails to consider when efficiency and democratic practice may conflict.

The reason I have emphasized transparency (as did the League) and the reason for enshrining transparent practices in the Charter is that there has been demonstrable resistance to transparency by this town government under the Charter.

The review committee chair, Julian Hynes, deserves credit for trying to avoid delay, provide outreach materials, bring in interested groups, include more items for consideration, and provide posted minutes. 

One Remedy
The League of Women Voters found widespread dissatisfaction with Amherst town government, particularly regarding transparency, accountability, accessibility, and opportunities for meaningful public participation. The review committee has failed to consider these concerns and has offered few suggestions to remedy them. I have charged that the committee’s efforts were dishonest, opaque, and insufficient to address current failings of local governance. Those who have come to the committee’s defense have offered nothing substantive to counter my specific charges. We are left with an incomplete and inadequate set of recommendations based on failed outreach and lack of deliberation, and will have to wait another decade for another broad review. 

The town council can now take on the responsibility of considering the important issues that the committee blithely ignored or dismissed. The problems could be significantly remedied by the council opting to use the same list of 200 suggestions Andy Churchill created and presented for the 9/6/26 Charter Review “retreat”, adding in rationales and  the LWVA survey comments that were submitted to them as feedback, sorting suggestions into buckets, and taking council votes. (The linked chart is color-coded by me to highlight the LWVA and Amherst Indy recommendations). That would remove the bias embedded in the committee’s composition, the failure to appoint a ninth member by filling a vacancy (See here, here, and here), and the failure to engage in meaningful deliberation (beyond up-or-down votes) on the vast majority of the suggestions. 

The failure of the Charter Review Committee to conduct an honest, open, and inclusive review is also a critical failure of our seven-year-old Council/Manager form of government. If it is not remedied, we should most certainly explore changing to a Council/Mayor government or returning to Town Meeting.

Darcy DuMont is a former town councilor and sponsor of the legislation creating the Amherst Energy and Climate Action Committee. She is a founding member of Zero Waste Amherst, Local Energy Advocates of Western MA, and a non-voting member of Valley Green Energy Working Group. She can be contacted at dumint140@gmail.com.