From the Record
Cecil County government is ticketed for an historic change.
After rejecting home rule charters five times previously over the past 42 years, a majority of the county’s voters approved a charter question on Tuesday’s general election ballot.
The measure passed with a resounding 58 percent of voters supporting the proposed charter, and 41 percent against. In total, 14,477 Cecil voters agreed to change their county government, replacing the five-member county commissioner board with an elected county executive and county council.
“We are thrilled,” Joyce Bowlsbey, chairwoman of the charter board, said the day after the election. “We feel that it is going to be good for Cecil County. We feel it’s going to help us have a more efficient form of government here.”
Bowlsbey said earlier that she believed more people were agreeable to the idea of charter government, but it was hard to tell which way the election would go.
“You can never be sure of an election,” she said. “I was optimistically looking forward to a win, but not sure that we would win.”
