After marking their choices for president, Congress, the state legislature, the county commission, and five statewide ballot questions, voters here will be presented with a sixth question that doesn’t appear on ballots beyond the Cape Cod Canal.

Question 6 asks voters whether they approve of amendments to the county charter that would “expressly authorize the Assembly of Delegates to increase, decrease, add or omit items to the annual budget proposed by the Board of Regional Commissioners” and “expressly authorize any member of the Assembly of Delegates, or the Board of Regional Commissioners, to introduce a request for a supplemental appropriation ordinance after the adoption of the County’s fiscal year operating budget.”

In other words, voters are being asked to make a decision on the Assembly of Delegates’ role in the county budgeting process — not a particularly easy question when most voters have no reason to know how the county’s budget process works at all.

“My concern is that the question, as written, is too narrow and in the weeds without enough context for most voters to make a truly informed decision,” said Paul Niedzwiecki, CEO of the Cape Cod Chamber of Commerce, which has not taken a position on Question 6.

“The future of the county needs to be put in its historical context,” said Niedzwiecki, who also served for 10 years as director of the Cape Cod Commission.

Several former and retiring state legislators told the Independent that Cape Cod’s county government is unusual and that the Assembly of Delegates, in particular, is unique.

“The Cape Cod Commission and the new county charter were created in parallel,” said former Cape and Islands state Sen. Rob O’Leary, who teaches history at the Mass. Maritime Academy and who served on the County Commission when the charter was being written in 1988. “There was no Assembly of Delegates before that — there was a financial advisory board with one member from each town, appointed by the select boards,” he said.

That advisory board functioned roughly like the finance committees in individual towns, offering advice and oversight, O’Leary said, but the new Assembly functioned more like town meeting — mostly approving budgets presented by county staff and the county commissioners but sometimes making changes to specific items.

“The county budget is not that big — about $27 million, smaller than most towns on Cape Cod,” said O’Leary. “I’m a history professor, and I do not think you need a whole system of checks and balances for this. It’s too much machinery.”

Eric Turkington was state representative for Falmouth and the Islands from 1989 to 2009 and a select board member in Falmouth before that. “A lot of things were brewing in the 1980s in response to exploding development,” Turkington said, “and the Cape Cod Land Bank, the Cape Cod Commission, and Cape Cod county government were all connected to that.”

The Assembly was created in large part because the Cape Cod Commission needed a democratically elected body to oversee and approve its regulatory plans, Turkington said, and the county commission, with only three members, didn’t seem to represent each town well enough. “You needed one from each town,” he said, “and you needed them to be elected, not just appointed by the select boards.”

The Assembly’s powers largely relate to the county budget and the land use regulations of the Cape Cod Commission, Turkington said. “Town meetings actually have a broader authority than the Assembly does — they can raise taxes, pass bylaws, and really impose their will in ways the Assembly can’t.”

State Sen. Sue Moran, who represents the Upper Cape and parts of Plymouth County and is retiring this year to run for Barnstable County clerk of courts, used to be deputy speaker in the Assembly, representing Falmouth. She donated $1,160 in campaign funds to pay for “Yes on Question 6” signs because the ballot measure “will make clear that there are co-equal branches of county government, that the Assembly’s role is what it has always been, and it will allow the county to get back to functioning.

“These disagreements had never really come up before the $41 million in ARPA funds” that the county received in 2021, Moran said. “It was almost like how families argue after a bequest from a rich uncle.”

“The commissioners’ original position was that the ARPA money was a grant, and the Assembly had no role whatsoever in grants,” said current Assembly Speaker Patrick Princi. “We were eventually able to direct a quarter of that $41 million to the towns themselves,” but relations between the Commission and the Assembly became increasingly strained and lawyerly after that, Princi said.

Princi, O’Leary, and Turkington all said they had at one point supported a reform effort that would merge the three commissioners and 15 assembly members into one seven-person county commission.

“It didn’t get through the Assembly because there were concerns, especially from the Outer Cape assembly members, that every town needed a separate voice,” Princi said.

That means there are 18 elected people managing the county’s $27-million budget, and voters have Question 6 before them now.

Princi and Moran said they support it. “The county charter needs a complete overhaul,” Princi said. “It’s antiquated, it doesn’t meet the proper and best forms of government for today, and it certainly doesn’t match the revenues we receive.”

Turkington said he does not support Question 6, and O’Leary said, “Vote against it? I don’t even know what it is.”

“The charter needs a transformative and objective review,” Niedzwiecki said, so the county government can “help towns address the challenges of the 21st century instead of the 1980s.”