Changes Afoot?

I know the Lowell Sun links eventually die off, but at least for a fortnight or so you can click here to read about a meeting at the Old Court a l'il while back where some activists, pols, and bloggers were talking about potential charter changes.

I know I only follow the links in a small percentage of e-mails and an even smaller percentage of blog posts, mainly because of that inconvenient little "24 hours in the day" problem. An incentive I'll offer you to read this one, though, is that you can expect these issues to be swirling around for the rest of this year, right into campaign season. Candidates may all be "pro-citizen, pro-accountability, and pro-education," etc. but their opinions on serious questions like these (Should positions be professionalized? Should representation be carved out by district? Should terms be longer? etc.) may wind up being one of the key ways that the candidates break out from one another.

Just looking at the ways a question like district representation bounced over from Taya Dixon Mullane and Carol McCarthy to the rebuttal from Victoria Fahlberg, who cited the problem of fiefdom-creation, which McCarthy countered with a term limit suggestion, only to see the CNAG doyenne and neighborhood activist maven Ann Marie Page challenge with a downside to term limits all adds up to show one thing: Reasonable, intelligent people are going to look at these sorts of questions and disagree. There isn't any one 'right' answer to any of this stuff. As I said a couple entries ago, though, I just hope that we don't make the mistake of conflating an outcome we might not like with a process that is inherently flawed.