People's Charter Reform: Trusting our Neighbors to Design a City that Works

Aug 10

I’ve called Hudson home for over 20 years. During that time, I have seen seven mayors come and go. I’ve seen how dysfunction in City Hall creates confusion and how that confusion divides us.

This dysfunction has real consequences.

It has made it too hard to call Hudson home. We pay too much and get too little. The City struggles to balance the budget, and to deliver basic services. And, we are very close to losing what makes Hudson special.

There are two structural problems that have been holding us back:

The Planning Gap, and our Antique City Charter.

The Planning Gap is the lack of a comprehensive plan to guide development and the lack of a City Planner to implement it. This means development has been driven, not by long-term community-driven vision, but by developers.

In 2018, I organized the FUTURE HUDSON with a dozen planners, designers, architects, and activists to advocate for an updated Comprehensive Plan, through an event series at the library.

We now have an updated plan, but still no City Planner. There is no one whose job it is to guide development towards our shared vision, or to engage the public.

This dysfunction is built into the way our government works — and that’s why fixing our second major obstacle, our Antique City Charter, is the key to solving them.

This is why I have been advocating for a People’s Charter Reform for over a year and a half. I have been clear and consistent on this. While all the candidates now support charter reform, I was the first. And, I was the first with an actual plan.

Let’s be clear, this is a wonky issue no one knows about, but it is serious. Our charter hasn’t been rewritten since 1921. It is a 100-year-old rulebook written for a city that no longer exists

It is time for us to redesign our city government from the ground up through real, comprehensive charter reform.

The city faces a choice in how we do it. My opponents offer one way, and I, another. Each builds trust into the process in different ways, giving them each a unique kind of legitimacy to the final charter.

My opponents will most likely propose a conventional charter review commission. This is where the Mayor or the Common Council President create a group of political appointees to lead a public process.

In this process, the authority comes from the elected officials and their political appointees, with some public input. A charter review commission will give the charter a kind of institutional legitimacy.

My proposal for a People’s Charter Reform through a citizen assembly is different. The authority in this process comes from informed, inclusive deliberation among everyday residents, giving it the greatest degree of democratic legitimacy.

This is how it would work.

Working with the Democracy Innovation Hub at the Hannah Arendt Center at Bard, Healthy Democracy, and The Assembly Project, the City would convene a citizen assembly of 20-36 residents chosen by civic lottery through random sampling to ensure true representation. Participants receive stipends, childcare, and transportation.

Over 4-6 full days over 2-3 months, trained facilitators will guide the assembly through learning about the charter, hearing from diverse experts and stakeholders, deliberating in small groups, and voting on recommendations—either a new charter or specific amendments.

We’ll use the National Civic League’s Model City Charter, the gold standard from the nation’s oldest good-governance organization, as a guide.

The Common Council would place these citizen proposals before the voters. An advisory group of stakeholders will oversee the process while independent evaluators assess and report publicly on its fairness and quality.

We often talk about the loss of public trust in governments. The truth that I encounter is that governments seem to have lost trust in the public.

The People’s Charter Reform is different from a conventional Charter Review Commission because it trusts everyday people to make the best decisions for all of us. People trust decisions made by other people, more than they trust decisions made by politicians.

My proposal is based on the very simple yet radical idea that when given time, support, and access to diverse perspectives, everyday people can produce fair, thoughtful, and widely trusted solutions to complex local challenges.

If you see me around, say hello.

Peter

MORE ABOUT CITIZEN ASSEMBLIES

WATCH

How Ireland Transformed Democracy with Citizens' Assemblies A video by DemocracyNext (2023)

When Citizens Assemble A 16m video by Patrick Chalmers on Ireland’s Citizens’ Assembly on abortion.

LISTEN
On Citizen Assemblies with Nick Romeo (author of New Yorker piece)
Reading Hannah Arendt with Roger Berkowitz

Claudia Chwalisz on Democracy Without Politicians How to Citizen with Baratunde Thurston

Claudia Chwalisz on Lifeboats Larry Lessig's Another Way Podcast

Helene Landemore with a Radical Proposal for True Democracy The Ezra Klein Show

MY CIVIC CONVERSATIONS

Philip Lindsay of the Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College

Nick Vlahos & Derek Okubo of the National Civic League

Peter MacLeod of MASSlbp on citizens assemblies

READ

What Could Citizen Assemblies Do for American Politics The New Yorker by Nick Romeo

A Visitor’s Perspective: Deschutes Civic Assembly on Youth Homelessness Nick Cocomma, Healthy Democracy