Council appointments to multi-member bodies
Medford passed a new charter that took effect on November 4th, 2025. Section 2-9 of that charter reads
The mayor shall refer to the city council and simultaneously file with the city clerk the name of each person the mayor desires to appoint as a member of a multiple-member body for whom no other method of appointment or selection is provided by charter. Appointments made by the mayor shall become effective on the thirtieth day after the date on which notice of the proposed appointment was filed with the city clerk unless rejected by a majority vote of the city council within 30 days of such filing and such rejection shall not be unreasonably withheld. The question on rejection of any appointment made by the mayor shall not be subject to the procedure of objection provided in section 2-8(b) of the charter.
This section is pretty important because it’s one of the only new checks and balances between the City Council and the Mayor in a municipality that’s typically given an inordinate amount of power to the executive. I spoke with a City Councilor in a neighboring municipality who said that this trend in Medford goes back to the 1600s, when much of the land in Medford was a private plantation owned by a former governor; another local politician told me it was because the 1986 switch from City Manager to Mayor was essentially done by crossing out the word “City Manager” and replacing it with the word “Mayor”, essentially making the executive — previously appointed by the City Council — entirely independent of the City Council, without putting in any new checks over the Mayor.
Passing the Charter is one thing. The implementation is something entirely different, and this particular section caused a bit of a kerfuffle. The gist of it is that the Mayor wanted to pass the names to Council in an email and let Council reject anyone that way (whether the rejection vote was meant to take place over email or trigger a placement on a subsequent Council agenda was never really clear to me), but Council wanted to have it all done in an open meeting, and to receive documentation on each candidate as well. These are the types of procedural spats that potentially bring volunteers into the crossfire. That’s one of my least-favorite parts of this job, because the debate’s supposed to be over process and not volunteers, though that subtlety often gets lost. I think initial hiccups in implementation are fine, and at this point City Council and the Mayor are pretty much in agreement about what the process should be moving forward.
In January, the Mayor started to carry out this section by emailing City Councilors with names of appointees and asking if anyone had any objections. I objected to the first one (I was the only one who did), had a phone call with the Mayor, then withdrew my objection when I learned nobody else on Council had. In subsequent Council meetings and emails, however, it became pretty clear that every Councilor took issue with this method, even if they hadn’t actually replied to the initial email.
Council got the appointee list onto an agenda eventually, then, at the February 24th meeting, we increasingly incensed ourselves over the lack of information we had on many of the appointees — most of them lacked resumes or even letters of appointment, which Council wanted to at least make an educated decision. That item was tabled at the February 24th meeting, and I requested more information on each candidate the day before it was taken up again at the March 10th meeting. In a later email to the Mayor, I wrote out some reasoning why placing all names on a Council agenda, with documentation, is not only the best way to implement this part of the Charter, but the only feasible way to carry out Section 2-9 of the Charter. The essential parts of that argument I’m pasting here:
The cited section of the Charter cannot be implemented if such a rejection vote were not even possible; in order for it to be possible, names must be on the agenda;
One alternative is to place a name on the agenda if one Council member objects in an email. This won't work because names would only then appear on the agenda if one Council member took issue with them, thus making the process unnecessarily combative. Regardless, under this system, any one Council member could and should also have the right to just object to everyone and place them on the agenda by default, but I think this would, again, become unnecessarily combative in practice.
Resumes and letters are not a requirement of the Charter; they are a courtesy, both to Council and the public, which will help Council make an educated decision. I don't think any charter would require those documents, though it could be written into an ordinance elsewhere as an implementation of the charter. I assume the resumes are all sitting somewhere, anyway, and the letters could essentially just be what Lisa's writing to us in an email anyway, so I don't see how this adds much time.
The Mayor ended up essentially agreeing with this, except to state that resumes aren’t easy for everyone to write (retired applicants, for instance), and the consensus of Council at the March 10th meeting was that we would even be fine with a letter of appointment explaining the applicant’s qualifications in lieu of a resume. At the last meeting, I motioned to reject one applicant that we had zero documentation for (though that applicant had already been sworn in), albeit with an invitation to resubmit with a resume and/or appointment letter. The chair of that board subsequently sent Council a resume and letter of appointment for that same applicant. The documents were there, they had just never been forwarded to Council.
Anyway, from internal communications, I think that all parties are essentially in agreement that the effective process for these boards and multi-member bodies is (1) submit all names to Council with a letter of appointment and, when possible, a resume; (2) take a vote to receive and place on file the applicants, effectively confirming them, or a rejection vote, during a regular meeting.
