STATE OF CONNECTICUT

 

OFFICE OF LEGISLATIVE RESEARCH

 

PETITIONING TOWN MEETINGS

 

REGARDING BOND ISSUANCES

 

 

 

Oct 14, 2003

 

By John Rappa, Principal Analyst

 

2003-R-0697

 

 

You asked if voters in charter towns could petition the town meeting (i. e. , the legislative body) to hold a referendum on whether the town should sell bonds to fund a capital project the voters proposed. You also asked if they could petition the town meeting for a referendum to rescind a similar approval voters granted at prior referendum. The Office of Legislative Research cannot give legal opinions and you should not regard this report as one.

SPECIAL TOWN MEETING TO APPROVE A BOND AUTHORIZATION

A town’s charter controls whether voters can petition for a special town meeting to hold a referendum on authorizing bonds for a project the voters propose. Simsbury’s charter, for example, explicitly allows voters to petition for a special town meeting for this purpose and to have the matter decided at a referendum (§§ 504 and 505). Guilford’s town meeting must approve all bond authorizations, but this power does not “limit, expand or otherwise affect the right of voters to petition for a machine vote…”(§ 7-5).

Other charters may implicitly give voters this right. Burlington’s charter does this by specifying the purposes for which voters cannot petition for a special meeting. These include adopting the annual budget

(which is done at the annual town meeting) and fixing the tax rate, but not authorizing bonds (§ 8-7). East Lyme’s charter provision specifying how voters can petition for a special meeting seems to limit the reasons for which they may do so:

The matters which the applicants for a special meeting desire to be acted upon shall, if proper subjects for town meeting action, be put in proper form for the call of the meeting and for a town meeting resolution with the assistance of the Town Counsel, and those matters shall be the first items in the call of the meeting (Sec. 7. 1. 2, emphasis added).

SPECIAL TOWN MEETING TO RESCIND A PREVIOUSLY APPROVED BOND AUTHORIZATION

It appears that town charters also control whether voters can petition for a special meeting to rescind a previously approved bond authorization, a 1995 Connecticut Supreme Court decision suggests. The Court upheld a Windham charter provision specifying the reasons for petitioning for a special town meeting. A taxpayers association petitioned to call a special meeting to propose a referendum to rescind the authorization. The selectmen rejected the petition because the charter did not allow referendum for that purpose. The association sued, arguing that the town meetings statutes allowed the petition and thus superseded the charter (Windham Taxpayers Association v. Board of Selectmen, 234 Conn. 513).

The trial court agreed that these statutes superseded the charter, but upheld the town on other grounds. On appeal the Supreme Court also upheld the town, but rejected the trail court’s conclusion that the town meeting statutes superseded the charter. The Home Rule Act, under which Windham adopted its charter, “suggests that if a municipality chooses to do so, it may limit the involvement of the town meeting to only the adoption of the annual budget” (p. 533). For this reason, CGS § 7-1 “does not preempt the provisions of the Windham town charter that delineated the circumstances requiring town meeting involvement”(p. 539).