City Council Plans To Put Proposed Charter Changes on 2025 Ballot

The Cambridge City Council set a tentative timeline for residents to approve changes to the city’s charter in a November 2025 ballot measure — more than three years since the city voted to update the charter on a regular basis.

In November 2021, Cambridge voters approved a ballot measure requesting the City Council establish a process to review and update the city’s charter every 10 years. Since then, the Council has approved five amendments — which largely preserve the current structure of Cambridge’s local government — and is currently debating increasing Councillor’s terms from two to four years.

In a Thursday special meeting, the City Council confirmed that Cambridge residents would vote on approved Charter amendments as ballot measure in November 2025.

“I’m hoping that we can hear more clearly about the timelines that we need to meet in order if we seriously want to have something on the ballot for November,” Councilor Paul F. Toner said.

Tanya L. Ford, the executive director of the Cambridge Election Commission, said that in order to be able to procure the necessary physical ballots for the election, the Election Commision would need to know the ballot measures by June 30.

But the deadline to finalize the ballot measures is even closer, as the City Council must first receive the approval of the Massachusetts Legislature before procuring the physical ballots.

Even with this tight timeline, Vice Mayor Marc C. McGovern voiced concern that Cantabrigians would not have enough time to “digest” the measures before voting on them in November.

“This is making me nervous the more I think about this, because these are big questions they're asking people, and people are going to need time to debate,” McGovern said.

“How do we give enough time for there actually be a healthy debate within the community and people who are going to want to campaign for should we do this or not do that?” he added.

The City Council appointed a 15 member committee of residents to make recommendations on changes to the Charter. After meeting 36 times between August 2022 and January 2024, it passed its final report without a final recommendation about the City’s current Plan E form of government.

At Thursday’s meeting, however, Councillor Sumbul Siddiqui acknowledged that many of the recommendations did not materialize in the Council’s discussions.

“I did want to just apologize,” she said. “There’s so many meetings that happen, and this is how the Council is kind of doing it — doing the work.”

She added that the body’s work set a precedent for how residents and local leaders can work in the future to amend Cambridge’s charter the next time the process takes place.

“Whoever is on the body then will be able to give much more direction and learn from the past,” Siddiqui said.

Resident Heather Hoffman encouraged the Council to more purposefully involve residents’ input in future Charter review discussions.

“One of the continuing things that I have seen in all of this charter change discussion is how to keep people like me out of the process” she said. “Let us actually talk about stuff. Let us be more of a part of this government.”

— Staff writer Jack B. Reardon can be reached at jack.reardon@thecrimson.com. Follow him on X @JackBReardon.