By Ronald A. Clark
Special to the Southwick Suffield News
Congratulations to the Suffield Board of Selectmen for rejecting the Charter Revision Commission’s town administrator recommendations. This could have been a legal and financial disaster for the town of Suffield. In 1996, the town of Naugatuck, Conn., passed a budget bifurcation town charter amendment. The Naugatuck Board of Education challenged this at both the trial and appellate court level before losing a Connecticut Supreme Court Decision in 2004. This meant that the Naugatuck taxpayers had to pay for both sides of an eight-year legal struggle before ending up where they started in the first place. All this was for something that didn’t affect the day-to-day running of the town.
What the Suffield CRC attempted was much worse. Connecticut General Statutes 7-193 provides that each municipality shall have only one chief executive officer, not a first selectman who has 80 percent of the authority and a primary assistant who has the other 20 percent. A prolonged court battle could have paralyzed Suffield’s ability to hire, supervise, evaluate and replace municipal employees for years.
Suffield taxpayers do have a serious need for Town Charter reform. To understand this better, let us compare Suffield and Town “X” (and its outstanding Town Charter), during teacher contract negotiations. Both school boards offer their teachers a 2 percent raise, but the similarities stop there. In Town “X”, the BOE and the teachers’ union actually sign a contract, but the Town Charter of Town “X” requires a referendum vote on teacher contracts. The citizens vote it down 60 percent to 40 percent. CGS 10-153d(b) specifically allows this. The Town “X” BOE now offers 1 percent, but its teachers want to go to arbitration for 2 percent. The two Republicans on the three-member BOS publicly announce they will vote to reject an arbitration award over 1 percent. CGS 10-153f (c)(7) authorizes this. The arbitrator doesn’t like to overrule an official public vote, he doesn’t want the Town “X” selectboard to reject his decision, and he certainly doesn’t want a three-member Binding Arbitration Panel to agree with the BOS. The arbitrator decides to give the Town “X” teachers 1 percent.
In Suffield, the BOE offers the teachers 2 percent, but the teachers want 3 percent. This despite the fact that each teacher in Suffield already gets paid many thousands of dollars more than the teachers in Town “X.” The same arbitrator gets this case, too, and studies the current Suffield Town Charter before making a decision. He sees that the public never votes on teacher contracts in Suffield. Maybe they like high taxes. He notes that Suffield has a five-member BOS. He knows that the five-member BOS option was put into the Connecticut General Statutes by big city union lawyers back in the day when most rural Republican politicians still milked their dairy cows by hand. CGS 10-153f (c)(7) authorizes the rejection of teacher arbitration awards, but only by a two-thirds majority. CGS 9-167a authorizes up to four members of the same political party on a five-member card, but CGS 9-188 specifically limits a five-member BOS to a maximum of three members of the same political party. The arbitrator knows the three Republicans on the BOS are only 60 percent of the total, not 2/3.
The arbitrator awards the Suffield teachers 3 percent confident he will not be overruled by either of the Democrats on the BOS joining the three Republicans. Suffield is one of the few towns in Connecticut that has, in effect, through its current Town Charter, constitutionally prohibited itself from rejecting expensive teacher contractor arbitration awards! What more could possibly need to be said?
Greenwich, Conn. has over 60,000 residents and is one of the most admired municipalities in the world, with the finest public library between New York City and Boston. Greenwich has a full-time first selectman CEO elected to a two-year term of office, and the same three-member BOS it has had for over the last 300 years. Greenwich also has a town administrator advisor to the first selectman. The first selectman, not the school superintendent, is responsible for negotiating all Board of Education employee contracts, except teachers. All of this saves millions and millions of dollars for Greenwich taxpayers. Suffield’s current Town Charter puts us in the middle. Career bureaucrats like town managers and school superintendents waste money, elected full-time CEO first selectmen save taxpayer dollars. If Suffield does what Greenwich does, taxes will go down and the quality of services (including education) will go up. If Suffield were to replace the first selectman with a town manager, services would go down and taxes would go up.
Citizens interested in lower taxes and better municipal and education services should read Connecticut State Board of Labor Decision #3232 (American Federation of School Administrators/Newington, CT) and Connecticut Supreme Court Decision Local 1186, AFSCME, et al. v. Board of Education of the City of New Britain, et al., 182 Conn. 93 (1980). Both of these discuss in depth Town Charter/education legal issues.
It doesn’t matter whom you vote for in the November BOS elections, as long as you vote for a candidate that pledges to immediately create a new, fair, competent, bi-partisan Charter Revision Commission. Three members from the same party on the new BOS pick seven. The remaining two members and their Town Party Chairman also pick seven. Each sub-committee elects a chairman, who then transfers two members to the other sub-committee. CGS 7-191(f) specifically allows for multiple choices. A new Democrat, a new Republican and the current Charter should be on a September 2011 referendum. If either of the new choices gets a majority vote, then that choice becomes the brand new and improved Suffield Town Charter.
