This is the fifth recent post related to the controversy over the Longmeadow School Superintendent’s contract. To read the previous four, go here, here, here, and here.
Longmeadow residents will meet in a Special Town Meeting (STM) this Thursday to decide the fate of a citizen petition calling for an amendment to the Town Charter that would create recall elections for some elected officials in town. The recall amendment would not cover elected members of the Select Board. According to Massachusetts General Law, creating a recall provision that would include the Select Board would require a Charter Commission, a much lengthier and more deliberative process that would include fact finding, public information sessions, and public hearings. This rather technical detail is actually very important to whether or not residents should approve the recall proposal at Thursday night’s STM, which is clearly aimed at four members of the present School Committee.
In Longmeadow, the work of the School Committee is at least as important and subject to vigorous contestation as that of the Select Board. It is indisputable that Longmeadow’s schools are among the town’s most valuable assets. In my view, this ought to make efforts to recall members of the School Committee just as difficult to accomplish as it is to recall members of the Select Board.
Day-to-day operating decisions and public policy enactments can have enormous significance, but they can almost always be corrected or reversed without altering the framework of government. This is absolutely the case in the present controversy. Regardless of which side of the Superintendent’s contract dispute one favors, the present electoral rules can and probably will resolve the matter at hand. The proposed recall amendment would not materially increase voters’ ability to hold present School Committee members accountable for their decision not to renew the Superintendent’s contract. Through the normal course of events, the June annual town election will give voters a clear (and less complicated) opportunity to ratify or veto the School Committee’s 4-3 vote against renewing the Superintendent’s contract.
The implementation of recall elections, on the other hand, promises increased tension and incivility as well as potential alienation of key stake holders in our school community, not to mention unknowable long term town-wide consequences. Unfortunately, hard feelings matter in politics. Hard feelings remaining from the hiring of the current Superintendent over a local candidate have clearly played a part in the present political unrest. The worst thing we could do is to change the Town Charter out of anger or frustration and without a deliberative process far removed from the passions of any particular political disagreement.
If, as I have explained above, correcting or ratifying the decision that motivated the proposed recall does not require a permanent change to our Town Charter, then the case for the recall amendment this Thursday night must be clear and convincing in the abstract entirely without reference to the present controversy. By this logic, residents who let the present very raw and unresolved controversy color their assessment of the proposed amendment are almost certainly demonstrating sub-optimal analytical objectivity. Since analytical objectivity is very difficult for human beings under the best conditions, it would seem eminently prudent to postpone and/or modify the process by which this recall amendment is considered. Considering it in a Special Town Meeting that will host hundreds of residents, virtually all of whom will have been mobilized and encouraged to attend by and for the purposes of one or the other side in the ongoing political dispute, would be demonstrably unwise. I believe simple prudence dictates that such an important and permanent change NOT be made in the high school gym this Thursday night.
If the argument for a recall amendment is theoretically and practically sound, it will remain so for the foreseeable future and can surely stand the time and rigor of the more deliberative Charter Commission process. The logic of state law that insulates the members of Select Boards from citizen petitions to the Town Meeting calling for recall elections should apply equally to the members of the School Committee, whose decisions are no less significant and whose ability to use their best judgment without fear of personal retribution is no less important to good governance.
The motivations of the recall petition’s sponsors are understandable. The School Committee majority’s mishandling of the Superintendent’s contract issue has been extremely frustrating, regardless of what you think of the decision’s ultimate merits. The Committee’s majority failed to build sufficient consensus for such a significant decision and has responded to the predictable backlash with undisguised contempt for the views, rights, and prerogatives of their critics. However, we cannot respond to the Committee’s mishandling of the superintendent’s contract issue by mishandling our Town Charter. Cooler heads must prevail on both the Superintendent’s contract and on the call to create recall elections in the Charter. Allowing the town’s regular annual election to go forward without either issue being finally resolved is very clearly the best option for the town at this point.
The two sides in the dispute over the Superintendent’s contract deserve the opportunity to make their case to voters. The Special Town Meeting on Thursday night is NOT that opportunity.
The only issue on the STM floor will be the wisdom of making a significant change to our Town Charter by adding a provision for recall elections. In the heat of the present controversy it is easy to forget that such a change would alter the environment in ways that simply cannot be well understood without dispassionate study and inquiry. I expect that there will be a lot of discussion of the particulars of the proposed recall process at the STM, which is well and good, but the real danger of recall election procedures involves the likelihood of their strategic use by organized political activists.
Though conceived as a weapon for the masses to wield against unresponsive elites, recall elections are often weapons wielded by elites against the less attentive, sophisticated, or well-organized members of a community. In Longmeadow, recalls are more likely to become a way for the few to obstruct the will of the many. Access to a recall procedure can be a very useful political weapon even if you do not have enough public support to actually recall someone. For example, I can assure you that opponents of Proposition 2&1/2 overrides for schools over the years and the opponents of building our wonderful new high school just a few years ago could have (and would have) easily obtained the 1700-plus signatures required by the proposed recall amendment in order to embarrass and intimidate elected officials who opposed them. This would not have been a healthy means of increasing accountability, and giving such a weapon to every critic of every future volunteer Longmeadow School Committee member would be a recipe for frequent disaster.
Most Longmeadow residents, like most Americans, do not like personalized political conflict. Note the abundance of civility lectures by folks on both sides of the present controversy. Nonetheless, personalization of political conflict remains the most powerful method of mobilizing political support, making it all but irresistible to passionate political activists. Longmeadow’s form of government, however, is designed to maximize both thoughtful public participation and collective deliberation; to transform conflict and competition into reasoned collective deliberation and decision making. The rules of this week’s STM proscribe personalizing the debate for a very good reason. Recall provisions fly in the face of the goals of our town’s form of government. Recalls are weapons of personalized politics -fueled by umbrage not argument- that place the value of confrontation and conflict above the value of reasoned debate and collective deliberation. Put simply, recalls are inconsistent with the Town Meeting form of local government that is so central to Longmeadow’s political culture.