MEXICO – After Town Manager John Madigan’s lengthy review of the proposed referendum ordinance and the addition of a few amendments, selectmen unanimously approved it.

That means the board must schedule a public hearing to allow residents to further tinker with the document that has been months in the making. It is expected to go before voters in November.

A majority of town meeting voters in June OK’d a citizen-initiated referendum question to allow for secret ballot voting on all town meeting warrant articles.

Mostly, at Wednesday night’s selectmen’s meeting, Madigan pointed out differences in semantics between what he drafted as the new ordinance at the behest of planners and selectmen, he said, and recommendations by a Maine Municipal Association official who reviewed it.

After Madigan explained in great detail each proposed ordinance item, board Chairman Barbara Laramee sought a motion to accept the ordinance as read and corrected. She then sought discussion from the board.

The only discussion came when resident Marjorie Richard, who initiated the citizen petition to change town meeting voting, accused the town manager of drafting the document without taking input from the Referendum Committee, to which she belonged.

Madigan and Laramee immediately disagreed that that was the case, with Madigan accusing Richard of writing a letter that he said was very deceiving.

“You drafted it, we didn’t,” Richard said to Madigan.

She was referring to her letter to the editor that ran in Wednesday’s Rumford Falls Times. In it, Richard states that Madigan’s draft ordinance did not contain any of the committee’s work as they had written it, and what they’d requested.

Madigan disagreed, saying everything done followed Mexico’s town-meeting style and took into consideration discussions hashed out at Planning Board and selectmen’s meetings.

“We went through all of this,” Laramee added. “We used other towns’ ordinances and we developed one that will hopefully work.”

Richard continued to lament that it was drafted by Madigan without committee input.

She then asked for a copy of the document, but Laramee said it wouldn’t be available to the public until the amendments and changes were retyped. That didn’t appease Richard, who said the document was introduced at a public meeting and should be made available to everyone.

Laramee would not relent until the marked up document was made presentable.

Another resident then took selectmen and Madigan to task, asking why the ordinance lumped articles together so that to disapprove one line item, residents would have to shoot the whole article down.

Madigan again explained the proposed referendum ordinance, which reduces town meeting warrant articles to 37, saying it was unrealistic to vote on every item, because it would create an 80-article ballot.

The woman accused Madigan of only placing articles he wanted in the ordinance, but Madigan and Laramee argued otherwise, saying they took the articles right off the town meeting warrant as written.

“We haven’t taken anything away. I made a few adjustments, so that everything related to a department will be in that department. We didn’t change anything,” he said.