When Central Falls voters open their ballots on Nov. 3, 2026, they will find four questions about our city’s Home Rule Charter. Two of them, Questions 1 and 2, deserve a careful second look. Each one combines two different changes into a single yes-or-no decision, and residents who support one change but not the other have no clean way to say so.
Question 1 asks voters to close a loophole that lets a mayor serve eight years, sit out a term, and then serve another eight years, and, in the same sentence, to set a new lifetime limit of 12 years. Question 2 does the same thing for City Council members.
On a first read, those sentences sound like reform. A closer read shows why they are worth unpacking.
Our charter today caps the mayor at eight consecutive years. That cap was added in 2012, as the city was coming out of bankruptcy and the Moreau-era scars. It was a post-receivership safeguard against concentrated power. The so-called loophole, serving eight, sitting out, coming back for another eight, is a real gap worth closing. A lifetime cap would do it.
But Questions 1 and 2 do more than close the loophole. They also raise the lifetime cap from eight years to 12. That is a 50 percent increase in how long any one person can serve in city government.
That is a meaningful change, and it is worth asking why it is arriving under a “loophole” heading rather than on its own. The 2023 Charter Review Commission, which was constituted by the same mayor, as she wrote in her own October 2023 newsletter, considered the same loophole issue and proposed a lifetime cap of eight years, not 12. The 2023 contested proposals did not reach the ballot; the council tabled them. Two years later, the same “close the loophole” language is back, but the cap number has grown by half. That is a process question worth putting on the table.
It is also worth noting that Mayor Maria Rivera told The Boston Globe on Dec. 2, 2025 that she would seek a third term if voters approve the new cap. She repeated that statement in The Valley Breeze later that month. She has every right to do so. But public statements of personal interest before a governing vote, combined with a single bundled ballot question, raise legitimate questions about whether the process is structured to protect voter choice.
At-large Councilor Tatiana Baena asked the council on Dec. 8 to split Questions 1 and 2 into their component parts — the textbook fix for bundling. Her motion was declined by the five other councilors present; Councilor Ferri was absent. Baena put her concern on the record: “we have had to make decisions about changing the Constitution in less than two weeks.”
Public notice matched that compressed timeline. Between the executive order that reconstituted the commission in late October and the Dec. 8 council vote, the mayor’s official newsletter referenced the charter review four times, each time without disclosing the topics, the questions, or the cap numbers. The first substantive description of the ballot questions reached residents on Friday, Dec. 5, three days before the vote, and that email combined Questions 1 and 2 into a single bullet.
A process designed to earn voter trust gives residents time to read what is being proposed, publishes the questions as written before the council votes, and separates changes that are legally distinct. Best practice in charter reform is that a change with the potential to affect a current officeholder applies prospectively to future officeholders, not to the incumbent who is in office when the ballot is drafted.
There is still time, but only until the Board of Elections certifies the ballot this summer. Before that deadline, the council can revisit the resolution, unbundle the two issues, and let each stand on its own merits. Residents who believe the loophole should be closed deserve to vote on that and only that. Residents who believe the lifetime cap should move from eight to twelve years deserve to weigh that choice on its own terms.
This is not an accusation. It is a request, that a charter-level decision, in a city that remembers what happens when oversight weakens, be given the process it deserves.
Angelo Marin
Central Falls
