In Plymouth, since about 1989, there have been at least 5 Charter Commissions on the ballot. In order to be on the ballot, over seven thousand signatures must be secured and certified by the Town Clerk. The Plymouth Charter Transition Committee or PCTC, did just that. But, the group found an interesting way to get those signatures.
Bobbi Clark has more:
Mike Hanlon, is a member of the executive committee of the PCTC:
“There are officers, this is a ballot question committee under state law, so we have a President, that’s Wrestling Brewster, Vice President is Robert Nassau, Alan Costello is the Clerk and I’m the Treasurer.”
In the spring of 2019, the group began to get signatures and Hanlon says a lot of the people who volunteered to do that are older:
“They’re fine walking around their neighborhood. But they don’t want to stand out on a regular basis. So we found that we needed to hire a professional signature collector.”
It is quite likely that restrictions due to the pandemic had an effect on the PCTC’s ability to get signatures, although Hanlon did not mention that. However, the hired signature collector did gather signatures with COVID limitations in place.
“We hired him just before the election in November. As you may recall there was a lot of early voting—he got twice as many signatures as we did in just a matter of weeks.”
Hanlon says that effort was not cheap.
“We’ve also struggled to get people to donate to the project.”
And perhaps because of that Hanlon and Costello both donated funds and loaned money to the PCTC, that’s according to the Campaign Finance Report of Dec. 31, 2020. And as of that date, the cost of securing signatures is close to seven thousand dollars.
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