NEWTOWN – Voters will go to the polls in November with the unusual opportunity to eliminate an elected body of town government that leaders say has existed in error for 20 years.
“I don’t want to get into the whole history of it, but it was a mistake that we have a Board of Finance,” town attorney David Grogins said during a discussion last week of charter revision questions that will go to voters on Nov . 8. “It was clearly a mistake.”
Grogins was referring to the biggest change to Newtown’s charter that voters will decide at the polls — whether to disband the Board of Finance in the name of streamlining the annual budget process and ridding residents of a duplicative layer of government.
“We worked with it as an error for many years and the intent here I hope is to rectify the error,” Grogins said at an Aug. 17 meetings of the Legislative Council, a 12-member elected body that by law is the fiscal authority in Newtown. “Few towns have legislative authorities and boards of finance like that.”
If leaders have their way, Newtown will not be one of those towns after the November election.
The only question is whether the voters will understand from the limited description on the ballot what it will mean for Newtown to eliminate its six-member Board of Finance, one of the four major elected governing bodies in town, along with the Board of Selectmen, the Board of Education and the Legislative Council.
The short answer is the Legislative Council would assume the Board of Finance’s role, leaders said.
During the budget season, the council could decide to appoint a temporary advisory body of fiscal experts.
“The Legislative Council will fill the vacuum that losing the Board of Finance would create,” said Jeff Capeci, the council chairman, during last week’s council meeting.
To get that message across to voters, the Legislative Council added a sentence to the ballot proposition to say that upon eliminating the Board of Finance, all powers would be vested in the Legislative Council.
“A lot of people I talk to say they don’t often follow the mechanics (of town government); they are going to see this and say, ‘Board of Finance – that sounds important; it’s just going away,’” Capeci said. “If there isn’t some assurance (that the council will conduct financial oversight) in the question where we hope they will see it, that would make people err on the side of caution and say, ‘no.’”
Fellow council member Ryan Knapp agreed.
“People are going to think that we are deleting the fiscal authority from the charter and they may not have the awareness to know that currently the Board of Finance as it exists in Newtown is an advisory body and not the fiscal authority in our community,” Knapp said.
How did Newtown get into this situation?
“It was done because the chairman of the charter revision commission in 2000 had proposed it, and (after) it was denied by the Legislative Council, he petitioned to put it on the ballot in a very awkward manner that left it as a municipal financial authority with no official conclusive authority,” Grogins said last week. (The finance board was) a body that was created to advise and duplicate an effort that was not necessary.”
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