Taryn for Charter Commission

(by Taryn Thoman) 

To those of you who signed my nomination papers for the Charter Commission, I am pleased to let you know that I am officially certified as a candidate and will be on the ballot this November.

Whenever I mention The Charter Commission to people I know around town, I get a deer in the headlights look. It’s not surprising, as I really didn’t know too many details on our present form of government until I started studying it.

Basically, the commission will be comprised of nine individuals from town who will review the current town charter line by line and make recommendations whenever the majority of the Commission agrees to make a recommendation. Later all voters will have a chance to either accept the change or vote it down. Our current charter is twenty one pages long and was adopted in April of 1989.

It begins with the preamble:

“The people of the Town of Barnstable, desiring to manage their affairs in an honest, forthright, and efficient manner, and wishing to participate most fully in exercising the rights and responsibilities of local government, and praying for the minimum of interference from the yet larger state, do adhere to this charter.

We assert our willingness to assume all responsibility for the conduct of matters pertaining to the town, and do by this document earnestly affirm our right as inhabitants of Barnstable, to live and grow in freedom, dignity, and tranquility.”

Sounds good to me. The current town charter is posted in its entirety on the town website: http://www.town.barnstable.ma.us/TownClerk/Charter/charter_current.pdf

It specifies the town’s form of government, the distribution of legislative, executive and other powers, and it delegates various legal and administrative functions as well as the procedures for making and implementing budgetary decisions.

The job of the charter commission will be to either tweak the existing charter, or frame a new one. The people you vote for will be either for change or for the status Quo, no matter how soft they try to sell you on a vote. It's taken over 20 citizens close to two years collecting over 7000 signatures and a lot of the Town’s Clerk time certifying the raw signatures to finally get the required 15% of the registered voters, some 4700 certified signatures just to get the subject on the ballot. Shouldn’t the charter be reviewed every so often without going through all that ? I’m sure there are a lot of other improvements that can be made after living with it for the last 20+ years .

As a business owner in the same location in Hyannis for over twenty years, I have seen tremendous changes in the town. I believe that a new charter needs to reflect those changes, according to the wishes of the people who are living, working and voting here in Barnstable.

As a charter commissioner, I will be a strong advocate for change. I will work hard for a charter that creates more accountability in town hall. I have great respect for those who worked tirelessly for two years to collect signatures for charter review, and hope to serve with many of those same individuals on the charter commission.