Hartford
“Am I concerned? Of course. We’re talking about a couple of hundred thousand dollars in revenue,” Selectboard Chairman Dick Grassi said Thursday afternoon.
The money Grassi and others are worried about is an estimated $250,000 in annual revenues from a new 1 percent municipal tax on rooms, meals and alcohol.
The tax was one of three charter changes approved by Hartford voters last month during Town Meeting. But now, legislators say, questions about the legality of the voting process mean the charter changes will not be approved this legislative session.
Without legislative approval, the town can’t enact the charter changes, which means that the option tax can’t be collected this year.
That would be a particularly unwelcome outcome, Grassi said, because officials were looking to the option tax revenues to help close a chronic budget gap between revenues and infrastructure maintenance needs.
“That will play a big part in our upcoming budget because we were looking forward to that revenue,” said Grassi.
People close to the process differ on what, exactly, caused the timetable to be derailed.
Town Manager Pat MacQueen told the Selectboard during a March 29 meeting that a set of minutes from a Dec. 28 joint meeting of the Selectboard and the Hartford School Board had not proven to be immediately available, but about a week later, town staff said a version of the minutes had been located and filed with the Secretary of State’s Office.
Grassi said his understanding was that any delay caused by that issue was not the cause of the Legislature’s decision not to take up the charter changes this session.
State Rep. Gabrielle Lucke, D-Hartford, said the decision was due to outstanding questions about whether Hartford’s process in presenting the charter changes to voters had been fully transparent.
“I want to be able to say this has got the full weight of the community behind it,” Lucke said.
Voters who approved the charter changes, on a 1,641–1,309 vote in the case of the option tax question, may not have had full access to the language of the charter changes on election day, she said.
“Thinking about the experience at the polls, did people get the opportunity to read the full text and see what’s being deleted and being added?” she asked “That’s putting a hold on the bill.”
The Hartford ballot didn’t include the full text of the proposed amendment, but it included summaries that described the changes. In the case of the option tax, the ballot asked voters whether the charter should “be amended to authorize the levy of a 1 percent rooms and meals/alcohol tax, the net proceeds of which to be deposited in a capital reserve fund until directed otherwise by vote of the Town.”
Quechee resident F.X. Flinn, a former Selectboard member who participated in a previous Hartford Charter Commission, said he sent an email raising similar concerns to Rep. Donna Sweaney, D-Windsor, who chairs the House Government Operations Committee, which handles charter changes.
During the Selectboard’s Jan. 19 public hearing on the charter changes, Flinn criticized the Selectboard for not having made the language of the actual charter changes available to the public.
“I think calling a public hearing on the charter amendments and not having the charter amendments as they will actually be available here for study or posted in advance of this meeting created a defect in this whole process,” he said, according to CATV video of the hearing.
That wasn’t the only fault Flinn found with the way the amendments were drafted, he said on Thursday.
“I had a lot of problems with the language and the entire process,” said Flinn.
Flinn said that the Charter Commission, which drafted the language in 2015, hadn’t been inclusive of a diversity of opinions, and that the unanimity of opinion had led to sloppy work.
“This was not well-done,” he said.
Lucke’s call was in response to a inquiry sent Wednesday to Sweaney, who on April 8 said the town’s paperwork submission had been completed quickly enough to be processed this session.
Grassi said his understanding was that the summary language on the ballot itself had not passed muster with the state.
“The language on the ballot apparently did not meet the standard,” Grassi said. “The original language was fine, but when they went into the voting booth, my understanding is that the language there was not complete, as required by the legislative counsel and the (House Government Operations) committee.”
Grassi said he thought that the summary language was written by the town’s attorney, Paul Giuliani. Giuliani worked with the Charter Commission to draft the language in the actual amendment.
But on Thursday, Giuliani said that he didn’t think he had written the language that appeared on the ballot.
“I don’t believe so,” he said. “I think all we did was the text of the amendment itself.”
At any rate, Giuliani said, his understanding was that the problem didn’t lie with the summary language, but with whether the text of the changes had been posted properly before the public hearing on the change — the issue raised by Flinn.
Giuliani said the best way out of the apparent morass would be for the Legislature to approve the charter changes despite any minor procedural errors that might have occurred.
“The Legislature can fix this,” he said. “It comes down to, was anyone prejudiced or harmed by a procedural error? That’s a legislative question. I would like to think the town representatives would at least look at that.”
But Lucke said that, with the end of a biennium at hand, the Legislature simply does not have the time to take the charter changes up.
“Things in Montpelier have been very intense,” she said.
She said that, had the issues been resolved earlier this year, it was possible that the changes could have still gone through, but that there was no way to know for sure.
Lucke characterized the delay as an opportunity and said of all the reasons to delay state action on the bill, “the most important one is making sure that the town manager will have a hand in this,” a reference to Leo Pullar, who was hired to be the new town manager in February but is not scheduled to begin work until July 1.
Separately from this issue, Town Moderator Roger Bloomfield recently sent the Selectboard a letter suggesting a new amendment to the charter that would fold the floor meeting, which is currently held after Town Meeting day, into Community Day, which is held the Saturday before Town Meeting.
Lucke said that the town could bring the charter changes back to voters to coincide with elections scheduled for August and November, which could pave the way for legislative approval in January.
The Hartford Selectboard is scheduled to discuss the issue at its upcoming meeting at 6 p.m. on Tuesday.
Matt Hongoltz-Hetling can be reached at mhonghet@vnews.com or 603-727-3211.