TERM-LIMIT BURDEN

The Bangor public will have a chance on Monday to tell city councilors what they think of the idea of extending the limit on councilors’ term from two to three and whether the school committee should be similarly limited. Absent compelling new information about the value of term limits, councilors are likely to find that the impulse to extend the council’s years of service answers the question of whether it is desirable to limit school-committee terms.

There is no or virtually no money, little prestige and no obvious perks to these political offices. People run for them because they want to serve their city, feel they can do it better than those currently in office, want the power to make direct changes in the way a municipality is run or hope to use it to run for other office. Term limits changes none of these except to ensure that the council or, potentially, the school committee has less cumulative experience than a similar board without term limits.

For evidence of the failure of term limits, the Maine Legislature is an excellent example: Lawmakers rise to and out of leadership positions too quickly to gain real skills at directing the unruly, headstrong members of the House and Senate; too many new lawmakers don’t understand the legislative process and spend a lot of time on procedure; defeated ideas come up again and again as those new lawmakers lack the history of the bills. Experienced lawmakers complain regularly about how much time is wasted by an idea that was supposed to bring new life to lawmaking.

For the council to decide in favor of continuing the debate on term limits for the school committee, it would need more than the fact that term limits are a popular reaction to politics. It would need evidence that limits can be beneficial – data from school committees elsewhere that changing from unlimited to limited terms has brought better governance on the committee and increased learning among students within that district. It would have to see, in effect, that students are better served when committee members are restricted in their years of service.

Absent that, all the council would have is guesses that moving the one or two long-serving people off the committee would strengthen it. It would be a risky hunch because the committee already has a history of blending both the experience of longtime members and the new ideas of those who spend one or two terms on the board. And it may seem that the couple of experienced board members are taking seats that other citizens are eager to sit in, but the low number of candidates for the board suggests otherwise.

Term limits can take care of a specific problem at a specific time, but then become a permanent burden afterward. The City Council, which might make the case for doing away with limits entirely rather than just increasing the terms allowed, keeps running into this fact, but does nothing about it because its members know how popular term limits are. It can do the school committee a favor by deciding not to pass that burden along.