On Dec. 16, 2024, Medford Mayor Breanna Lungo-Koehn announced that her office sent an updated draft of a new city charter to the Medford City Council. The Medford Charter Study Committee — established in December 2022 — reviewed and made recommendations for a new city charter in a nearly two-year process. The charter has not been changed since the 1980s.
Proposed changes to the charter include ward representation for the school committee and the city council, the addition of city councilors, term limits for the mayor and an extension of mayoral terms from two years to four years.
Residents have been advocating for charter review since 2014. The city council failed to approve a charter study once in 2016 and twice in 2020. Lungo-Koehn was approached by the Medford Charter Review Coalition, which included Milva McDonald, to begin a charter study committee.
“When I ran for mayor in 2019 I made it a point of my campaign to say that we definitely need to review and update our charter,” Lungo-Koehn said. “At this point, it’s over 40 years old, and it’s two pages — definitely not adequate for a city of this size.”
McDonald, chair of the Medford Charter Review Committee, explained how the committee came up with several of their proposals.
“We had a survey we put out to the whole city, and we got back between 600 and 700 responses, which doesn’t sound like a lot, but statistically, it’s pretty good. And we also had listening sessions around the city,” she said.
The review committee, the mayor and the city council also partnered with the Edward J. Collins, Jr. Center for Public Management at UMass Boston.
After Lungo-Koehn’s own review of the Medford Study Committee’s initial draft, the Collins Center provided additional evaluation to remove any discrepancies.
“They do this work all over the state. They know what should and should not be in a charter,” Lungo-Koehn said.
City Council President Isaac “Zac” Bears explained the process of reviewing the proposed charter in city council, “Once the Governance Committee of the Council is finished with that, they’ll recommend an amended version of the charter draft to the full council. The full council will have a final vote on that, and could amend it further at that point…” he said. “I expect some changes, tweaks and adjustments from the Council.”
Bears and Lungo-Koehn both said that they were grateful for the work the Charter Study Committee did during the review process.
Ward representation is something that residents have wanted for a long time. The committee discovered that, from 2005 to 2021, there were two wards in the city that had had no representation on city council, and there were another two wards that were disproportionately overrepresented.
Though Medford has eight wards, the city cannot have an even number of representatives.
“We determined eight ward councilors, one from each ward, and three at-large,” McDonald said. “And that number puts Medford in line with other cities in the state, because our council is the smallest in the state for a city of our size.”
From their research, the Charter Study Committee found that many residents advocated for term limits for all elected officials.
“When we dug into the research on that, what we found is that term limits are very popular, but they don’t tend to achieve the ends that people want them to achieve and that, particularly for legislative branches, there’s a long learning curve for legislating, so term limits can affect that,” McDonald said.
Not every council member supports the added term limits.
“I think that they’re anti-democratic. I think that they say that the voters can’t be trusted to make the choices that they want to make,” Bears said. “If the voters want someone to be in charge for 20 years, I think that’s the voters’ choice. I’m not going to die on that hill, but that’s been my opinion for a very long time.”
The committee decided to impose mayoral term limits, but not school committee and city council term limits, in consideration of community feedback.
“This was another thing that we heard over and over again from people in the city. Two years is not enough time for the executive to do the kinds of things that an executive of a city has to do,” McDonald said. “It’s also trending. In Massachusetts, many cities are lengthening the mayor's term limit to four years.”
Medford once had the longest running mayor in the state — Mayor Michael McGlynn’s 28-year tenure — from 1988 to 2016.
Lungo-Koehn said she wanted mayoral term limits to be reviewed.
“I know that sounds crazy because I’m the mayor,” she said. “But I did think that having a sitting mayor for [about] 30 years is not something that is helpful for a city or town, so I definitely wanted term limits reviewed.”
“I think that there is a lot of merit to the idea of a four-year term for mayor, and that there’s merit for the idea of longer terms in general for elected officials,” Bears said.
After the city council approves the charter, a home rule petition will be sent to the state legislature for approval. If the legislature approves the new charter by September, then the charter will face Medford voters in November through a ballot question. The approved charter would go into effect for the 2027 municipal election, with changes to the budgetary process taking effect on July 1, 2028.
