The Medford City Council Committee of the Whole approved updates to the City Charter on March 4, sending the new charter to a final vote. The updates include a highly-debated district-based council composition plan, setting it up to be sent to the state legislature for final authorization.
The proposal involves increasing the current seven-person composition of the council to nine members — four district members and five at-large. The proposed districts would combine Medford’s eight wards into pairs that would represent roughly the same demographics as the current wards, according to City Council President Zac Bears. The proposal was approved by the committee in a 5–2 vote.
The updated charter passed in the council’s Tuesday meeting and must be signed by Mayor Breanna Lungo-Koehn. If approved by the state legislature, it will appear on the November 2025 local election ballot, and with voter approval, will be implemented in the 2027 legislative session. Councilors said that due to the need for the state legislature’s approval, more drastic changes to the charter — like implementing ranked-choice voting or multi-member districts — were off the table.
Lungo-Koehn introduced the proposed charter to the council after years of research from the Charter Study Committee, a board led by Medford residents, and the Edward J. Collins, Jr. Center for Public Management.
For its final report, the Charter Study Committee considered several proposals to reshape the council’s composition, including a switch to eight ward councilors or a hybrid model with both ward and at-large seats. Lungo-Koehn approved the final proposed hybrid plan, with eight ward councilors and three at-large councilors.
According to a committee survey, the hybrid ward plan was the most popular option, as opposed to an all-ward plan and the current at-large system, though the combined district idea had not been proposed at the time.
Several councilors supported introducing the district model as an alternative to the ward model due to concerns about the relatively small size of Medford wards and the possibility that councilors could become defensive of their wards and resistant to new developments, according to Councilor Emily Lazzaro.
Bears said projects could lose support if ward councilors had the informal ability to postpone or block them, and also highlighted the potential for incumbents to run uncontested in uncompetitive elections.
“I feel like the larger districts address these concerns because they make the local district councilors accountable to more voters and more likely to face a competitive challenge because there’s a bigger pool of potential opponents,” he said.
Equity was also a central point of debate. Proponents of the hybrid ward proposal argue that wards will allow minority groups to have greater representation in their elected officials. Justin Tseng, chair of the committee that debated charter updates throughout the year, said larger districts would improve representation for communities of color more than wards.
“It might seem more intuitive to draw smaller districts to raise the voices of neighborhoods of color, but when you look at a lot of academic research that’s been done out there, doing that oftentimes creates a situation where most of the politicians that you elect aren’t responsive to neighborhoods of color because they’re all just in one or one or two districts,” Tseng said.
Lazzaro, who voted against the district plan, said she preferred individual ward representation, with eight ward councilors and three at-large.
“It’s really hard to run for city council in Medford, because everybody has to run at-large. Everybody has to run across the whole city. For a first-time candidate, you’re running for 60,000 people. It’s a crazy thing to do as a first-time candidate. It’s very expensive,” she said. “I talked about ward-based representation on the doors a lot, and during my campaign a lot, and since I said ward-based representation, I wanted to carry that promise through.”
Lazzaro also shared that she spoke with residents of other ward-represented municipalities who felt the model allowed them to build closer relationships with their representatives. Councilor George Scarpelli joined Lazzaro with a “No” vote in opposition to the district plan.
The Charter Study Committee, which Lungo-Koehn formed in December 2022, has defended the rejected ward plan.
“Even before I was on this committee, people have been talking about charter review for years in this city and whenever they would say ‘charter review,’ they would say ‘ward representation’ in the same breath. It’s been something that people have wanted for quite a long time,” Milva McDonald, the committee chair, said.
“Council members [and Charter Study] Committee members are really aware that there is no perfect solution — be it the eight-three system, four-five system — none of these solutions are perfect,” Tseng said. “All of them have pros, and all of them have cons.”
The updated charter also contains similar changes to the school committee. The four district model will also be used and will contain two at-large districts. Changes will also be made to the office of the mayor, including increasing their term from two years to four, imposing a four consecutive term limit and removing them as chair of the school committee.
Clarification: This article has been updated to reflect that the Charter Study Committee proposed one council composition to be approved by the mayor.
