📰BIDDEFORD | Six things in Biddeford’s charter that don’t line up, and a meeting where you can say so

Aug 8
5 min read

By Sam Pecor, Commissioner for Ward 7

August 8, 2026, The Charter Commission holds its first public hearing Monday, August 10, at 6:00 p.m. in the Council Chambers at City Hall. It’s the first real chance for residents to tell us what this commission ought to be looking at, and the workshop right after is where we start sorting the charter into the pieces we’ll work through. If you’ve ever wondered what a charter commission does between the election that created it and the ballot questions that come out the other end, this is that part.

Why this matters

The charter is the city’s operating manual, setting who appoints whom, how many votes it takes to spend your money, how much notice you get before a meeting, and what recourse you have when you disagree. Most of the time nobody reads it. It surfaces when something goes sideways—a contested appointment, a close budget vote, a permit somebody wants overturned—and by then the wording is already whatever it is.

This review turned up problems, though I don’t mean scandals so much as places where the charter and state law point in different directions, where an ordinance doesn’t line up with the charter, or where a rule can’t literally be followed. A commission gets seated maybe once every decade or two, and the clock on this one is shorter than most people realize: our report is due nine months after the commission’s election, and a member said out loud at our first meeting that we’re already behind.

How I put this list together

I spent most of this year reading the charter, the code, the land development regulations, and the Maine statutes they point to, writing up every conflict, ambiguity, and compliance question I found. The catalog stands at sixty-six issues, and these are the ones I think residents should care about most.

Some ground rules before the list. This is issue-spotting rather than legal review, I’m not a lawyer, and none of it substitutes for the City’s counsel. Where the City’s position differs from mine and has been stated on the record, I say so. Where I describe how something could go wrong, that’s what a gap permits, not an allegation that anyone did anything, and a gap in the text almost never means past decisions get undone.

This is one commissioner’s read. I’d rather you argue with it than take it on faith.

The six

1. The charter can be read to say you can’t amend it yourself. State law says you can. Article XII says the charter may be changed "in matters of form and substance only by" a commission. Maine’s Home Rule Act gives voters a petition route to amend a single provision, and the heading over that charter sentence reads "Revision of Charter," which cuts the other way a little, but a sentence reaching form and substance is hard to confine to revisions. The city’s own commission page, meanwhile, has been telling residents the restrictive version.

2. This commission’s own composition is disputed. State statute puts the appointed side of a charter commission at three members and ours says two. The City Solicitor advised in July that the seated body is lawful under home rule; I read the statute differently. At our July 16 organizational meeting I put it to Alex Pringle, the Maine Municipal Association’s legal director. He wouldn’t opine on the merits and was careful not to second-guess the Solicitor, but he said a second opinion from counsel answerable only to the Commission would be appropriate, and that it’s the full Commission’s call. He separately urged us to retain our own independent counsel for the whole process. Asked whether he’d seen comparable inconsistencies, he said not like this, and no Maine court has decided which rule controls.

3. An ordinance may set a higher vote threshold than the charter allows. The charter passes an appropriation on a majority of the nine-member Council, while a code section requires six votes to use unassigned fund balance to offset a property-tax increase, and those numbers conflict if the draw is part of adopting the appropriation. If it works as a post-adoption transfer between departments, the charter itself requires two-thirds and the two may coexist. It came up in this year’s budget, and the text should say plainly which applies.

4. A code section can be read to allow an overrun without a Council vote. The charter says flatly that "there shall be no subsequent expenditures authorized for any purpose," and allows transfers only by a recorded two-thirds vote of the full Council. A code section re-enacted last year lets the City Manager approve a payment that would overdraw a department’s appropriation, with a report to the Finance Committee afterward. If that’s only an internal payment control both rules can stand, but if it’s being treated as authority to spend past the appropriation, they can’t.

5. One notice rule can’t be obeyed for a late-called special meeting. The charter allows a special Council meeting on 24 hours’ notice to members, served in person or left at their homes, then sends public notice to Article X, Section 3(a), which requires newspaper notice the Friday before the week of the meeting. Call a meeting after that Friday and you can’t satisfy both, and the School Committee carries the same problem in its own provision.

6. A drafting error omitted a nomination right, and the city has acknowledged it. Since the 2016 charter change, several ordinances have described a single mayoral nomination for board vacancies, dropping the co-equal nomination right the charter gives each board’s own chair and the Council-President fallback. I raised it by email before the June 2 second reading of an ordinance creating a new veterans committee, before I was even elected. The Solicitor concurred, the ordinance was amended to cross-reference the charter, and it passed. He also said every committee should be consistent with the charter but declined to review the rest that night. So one ordinance got fixed and the others are still sitting there.

What this list is not

All of the above is textual or drafting work: two provisions that diverge, an older rule that leaves out a controlling requirement, wording that’s hard to operate as written. A few of them stay interpretive until records show how the City actually applies them, and the full catalog has more, including a documented audit-timeliness problem I will come back to.

None of these are positions the Commission has taken, and it hasn’t voted on any of them. Nor does any of it reach the larger questions in front of us: how often we hold elections and when, what the Mayor, the Council, and the City Manager should each actually be responsible for, whether the city’s fiscal controls are the right ones rather than merely inconsistent, and whether a charter should be prescribing operating detail at all instead of setting a framework and leaving the rest to ordinance. I do have opinions on those, but they’re going in a separate piece, because they deserve to be argued on their merits rather than smuggled in behind a list of technical fixes.

For now: Monday, 6:00 p.m., Council Chambers. It’s the first public hearing, and the point of it is to hear from you rather than from me, so tell us which of these belong in the charter rewrite, which the City should handle another way, and what I’ve left off the list.

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