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Norwalk Common Council Advances Three Charter Revision Questions to Ballot

August 22, 2025
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Niko Balkaran

NORWALK, Conn. — In a special meeting on Wednesday night that was at times tense, the Common Council voted, 9 to 6, to send three charter revision questions to the November 4 ballot. 

The first question includes general improvements, such as renaming the Common Council to the City Council, reducing petition requirements for public referenda, making it easier for the public to know about board and commission vacancies, as well as creating separate expenditure caps on the general government and Board of Education. 

Two other debated issues to this question included whether to add a member of the Council as a nonvoting ex officio member to the Board of Estimate and Taxation, and other revisions from the 2023 Charter revision, such as date changes.

The second question revolved around expanding four-year terms for the Mayor and Town Clerk in the 2029 Municipal Election and for the Council in the 2031 Municipal Election. Earlier in the meeting, Council Member Jalin Sead made a motion to strike this from the revised charter, as this could be perceived by the public as a “power grab” since the majority of the Council are Democrats. 

While other members agreed with Council Member Sead’s view, some countered that there would be stronger leadership and elected officials would be able to accomplish more.

“When you first get on Council, your first year, you’re just learning how the ropes are pulled, and then you become effective, maybe in your second or third year,” said Council Member Lisa Shanahan. “So I do see good reasons to support a four-year term, because I think it does bring about more effective elected leadership.”

Ultimately, the motion failed 10 to 5. This question raised concerns of voting to allow elected officials to hold office for longer without term limits, as Connecticut does not have state-imposed term limits for municipal officials.

The third question that voters can expect on the ballot is whether to increase the compensation that members of the Council receive. This Charter Revision Commission recommendation seeks to provide each member with an amount equal to 3% of the mayor’s budgeted salary following the 2029 Municipal Election. Currently, members are paid $50 monthly. 

According to Council Member Darlene Young, this increase can help draw in the future a diverse range of residents to apply for the Council, who may have had to “think twice about joining or participating in this process because of financial concerns.”

The Council also amended the charter by striking a proposal to increase At-Large Council seats by two, for a total of seven. However, after the vote failed to pass, Council At-Large membership remains at five. 

Additionally, the Council also voted against an item involving the political and geographical balance of the BET, one of Norwalk’s most powerful bodies, after members noted the proposal lacked measures in the event of not being able to fill a seat.

“It’s definitely advisable that we have a representative from each district, but it doesn’t work unless you have a fail-safe in case, for some crazy reason, you can’t find somebody, and then what happens?” asked Council Member Shanahan. “So then you’d have maybe only four members because you can’t find that fifth member, and then you have a tied BET, and you can’t get proper votes.”

The Council also authorized Richard McQuaid, the Town Clerk, to publish the revised charter in a newspaper, with a notice that residents can visit his office to review a copy, have one mailed to their house, or access it online. The Council also voted to give McQuaid permission, with the help of Charter Counsel, to prepare explanatory text that will expand upon the proposed charter changes that will be on the ballot, so that Norwalk residents can know what they are voting for on November 4.

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4 responses to “Norwalk Common Council Advances Three Charter Revision Questions to Ballot”

  1. Elsa Peterson Obuchowski

    Could you please clarify “Ultimately, the motion failed 10 to 5”? I know people could watch the video to figure this out, but it would be helpful to state it more clearly in the text. The preceding paragraphs are talking about expanding four-year terms for the Mayor and Town Clerk and a motion to strike this. So did the motion to strike fail? Or did the motion to expand the terms fail?

  2. David Muccigrosso

    Not that my esteemed fellow commenters care about my know-it-all stances, but here’s how I’ll be voting:

    Q1: NO. This question represents the worst impulses of our hyperactive addiction to oversimplified “good government”. We will never get better results from our bureaucracy by creating more bureaucracy. And specifically on the lowering the referendum threshold, none less than the great state of California is an EXCELLENT example of the failures of this kind of “direct democracy”. Our Founders gave us a republic because they understood that the populist passions driving these referenda indeed needed to be addressed, but could never truly deliver quality policy.

    As a point of personal shade, I wonder if the RTC will get over its hatred of local government enough to stick with its republican principles on this one. I doubt it, because modern Republicans have amply demonstrated that they no longer deserve the name.

    Q2: YES. Despite my quite-public misgivings about the current mayor and the machine he runs, I support longer terms and abhor term limits. The solution to entrenched incumbency is NOT term limits; I have witnessed up close the utter CESSPIT that term limits made of my home state of Missouri’s legislature. No, the solution to entrenched incumbency is to enact multi-party reforms like Ranked Choice, Proportional Representation, and Multi-Member-Districts; these weaken the two-party duopoly over our political system and allow challengers to unseat incumbents easier.

    Q3: YES. Thomas Jefferson was among the most misguided of the founding generation, and his backwards vision of the yeoman-citizen-legislator was obsolete long before it rattled out of his slavery-addled mind. Our public servants should not have to work for peanuts; while forcing them to do so would seem to appeal to popular anger at supposed lassitude and self-dealing, it merely ensures that the idle rich and pauper-activist ideologues are the only people who can afford to serve their communities. This is a sick and silly obsession that should be relegated to the dustbin of history. Legislating is a JOB, and if our legislators could afford to spend more time on it, we’d get better results. Pay them more!

  3. John Levin

    David: I struggle to understand how you were able to conclude: “Q1: NO. This question represents the worst impulses of our hyperactive addiction to oversimplified “good government”.” I suspect that you don’t know what Question 1 is about. To put it simply, Q1 is everything else that the Charter Revision Commission (CRC) worked on, recommended to the Council, and that the Council has accepted (Q2 and Q3 simply offer separate treatment for the 2 likely controversial changes: 4 year terms and raising Council pay — fwiw, this is the Charter referendum structure that I urged the Council to adopt at the opening of Wednesday’s Special Meeting, and I am pleased they chose that path). Q1 is a pretty long list of items, some just technical language fixes but others offer some material changes, many of which I believe enhance our local democracy. Among these are reducing the threshold of signatures required for a for a voter petition to place a referendum onto the municipal ballot from the current 8% of registered voters to 4% (with 65,252 voters, the required signatures — GATHERED BY HAND, WITH NAMES AND ADDRESSES CLEARLY LEGIBLE — would fall from 5,221 to 2,611). Norwalk has not had a citizen petition for referendum in 40 years — I don’t think this this change will turn Norwalk into California. Also, our state severely restricts what a municipal voter referendum may do; the only permitted items for Norwalk are to reject a budget, repeal an ordinance, or undo an action by the Council. The comparison to California’s state-wide initiatives is simply wrong.

    Another important change is to require improved disclosure and transparency for city Board and Commission appointments. The current arrangement is profoundly opaque, which compounds the Mayor’s inordinate appointment powers — nominees are simply presented by the Mayor to the Council for approval. Applicants not selected by the Mayor often are simply ignored while vacancies remain open. Non-accepted applicants are never revealed to the Council (or the public). This important city function should be much more transparent than it is now. Does that change reflect “hyperactive addiction to oversimplified ‘good government’”? I don’t think it does.

    Q1 will contain additional changes, of course. Still other changes were considered by the CRC, but they were rejected by Commission votes. Norwalk’s Charter requires another CRC in 2030, but the Council has the option to create one at any time, and under state law voters may petition for a CRC to be formed to consider a specific item.

    1. David Muccigrosso

      John —

      Thank you dearly for the clarification on Q1! Although I accept your point about the referendum reform being largely toothless, I still don’t see the point in making toothless reforms. At worst, they DO end up with unintended consequences; at best, they clog our governing documents with intellectual detritus and undermine its popular legitimacy with their very toothlessness. Is THIS the BEST that we could have had our legislators spending their time on in service of we, the public — a toothless reform?

      RE the transparency reforms, I *would* in fact regard those proposed changes as negative, if not precisely matching my original core criticism that you quoted. Presidents don’t publicly release shortlists of their VPs or SCOTUS picks, let alone the longer initial lists; nor do governors release the same when they appoint someone to fill a vacant Senate seat.

      I would challenge you that your proximity to our local government has given you and other local leaders a case of tunnel vision: You rightly object to various mayoral appointees and non-appointments because you all (broadly) are participating in the “game of appointments”. You care who gets appointed, or which vacancies get filled. And while there’s nothing wrong with caring about those things, I think you’re failing to see the root cause of your objections: That our local government isn’t *working* for us.

      Does our Mayor refuse to fill a vacancy because no one’s forcing him to explain why, or does he refuse to do it because he knows voters will not hold him accountable for it? Your arguments, and the general consensus, seem to imply that you mostly consider the former to be the reason. I think it’s more 40/60-20/80 between the former and latter! The political machine he heads is PRIMARILY protected by obsolete statewide laws requiring first-past-the-post voting and allowing for unrepresentative “at-large” seats with ZERO proportional math, thus creating a lopsided two-party system of localized one-party rule — not to mention a dozen other smaller dynamics, like our obsolete and exclusionary restrictions on vote-by-mail or even electronic voting, our turnout-depressing off-year election cycles, and the death of local media in recent decades. Sure, the machine BENEFITS from the opacity, for sure, but it does not EXIST because of the opacity.

      I would argue that it exists because of inertia, and because well-meaning highly-engaged citizens such as yourself focus on the daily ins-and-outs of what is achievable under an objectively unjust and obsolete election system, rather than on how to fix that system so that we don’t get mayors who intentionally leave vacancies open in the first place.

      And if and when we finally manage to fix that system and get mayors happily willing to fill vacancies because they are responsive to a well-represented electorate, I would genuinely prefer to afford them the privacy of some modicum of opacity in their decisions. The entire republican principle of democracy, after all, is that of a feedback loop: Because we do not have the time to properly judge every little process or minute decision, we citizens judge our leaders on their performance and the performance of their appointments. The precise process by which they make those appointments does NOT matter, so long as we have an ELECTORAL process that can reliably punish those leaders for mistakes, and elect ones who will make fewer mistakes. If we do not have an electoral process that can do so, then it does not matter how transparent the rest of our governing processes are.

      Any king can rule in an open court; most throughout the millennia have indeed ruled quite proudly! The problem of tyranny is not the opacity of the tyrant, but the fact that the tyrant is not accountable to the people.

      I will still be voting no on Q1.

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