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Publication Date: December 5th, 2025
Image created by remixing an Economist visual with ChatGPT
Fifteen Ideas to Improve Hudson City Hall begins with the small things. Not grand redevelopment schemes or budget rewrites, but practical steps that any competent official could execute without committees, consultants, or new spending. Some proposals are creative, others are simple housekeeping, all are meant to make City Hall more efficient, apolitical, and enable it to treat all residents as equals (read more about why we champion these values).
Each idea ties to a specific department and a specific individual with the authority to act. Later work will examine the larger, slower battles that require coalitions, funding, or charter reform. This series focuses on low hanging fruit, the changes that do not need consensus, only a decision.
Hudson Common Sense will, from time to time, remain sharply critical of the outgoing mayor, the Common Council president, and their county peer Matt Murell. That does not mean we are reflexively negative. It means we have standards and have seen how better run cities and organisations operate. Our day jobs involve ideas, startups, and fixing large systems that have drifted into complacency.
This series is a return to form and to the original purpose of Hudson Common Sense: to inject fresh, concrete ideas into the local polis.
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As you follow along for the next 15 days, you may come across residents who have the talent and discipline to serve in the Mayorâs informal kitchen cabinet or to fill vacancies on the cityâs boards and commissions. Submit their names to us for our upcoming series, âHudsonâs Got Talent,â which will spotlight candidates whose instinct is not to run toward government, but who could bring real competence and creativity if they chose to serve a tour of duty. Submit your nominations either by submitting a Guest Op-Ed, emailing us at đ [email protected], or by sending us an Instagram DM.
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Hudsonâs municipal footprint remains outsized for a shrinking population. Until the charter catches up with reality, the city must search widely for capable citizens.
One Day, One Desk, Hudsonâs One-Stop Shop for Resident Service
Area of Responsibility (AoR): Mayorâs Office
Implementer: Mayor + All Department Heads, and their resident serving staff
Hudson residents should not need a map and a double espresso to navigate basic city services. Today, residents bounce between City Hall in the center, Code Enforcement in the northeast, and the police station in the southeast, just to pay taxes, resolve permits, or settle a parking ticket. City Hall staff lose hours to constant walk-ins interrupting deep work and focus. Residents lose hours trying to decode a system that even insiders struggle to describe. Imagine being a first-time homeowner from a first world country and decoding our property tax system and dates, building permits, Planning Board etc. The outcome is predictable: slow service, duplicated effort, and mounting frustration. And all this in spite of the stellar work of the City Hall staff who go above and beyond in a resource constrained environment and a City where criticism and misinformation is more common than common sense and facts.
The solution could be the Hudson H.U.D.D.L.E. (if we must we can use the good ole HUDdle cliche), short for the Hudson Unified Desk for Daily Local Essentials. Once a week, all frontline teams assemble for a single public-facing service window. Code Enforcement, DPW, the Treasurer, Building and Planning, the Clerkâs office, and anyone else the mayor deputizes, sit shoulder-to-shoulder, cross-pollinating instead of working in silos. Residents bring any issue to one desk. Staff triage together and solve interlocking problems in minutes instead of sending people on office-to-office scavenger hunts.
To match the physical H.U.D.D.L.E., the city should run a single customer-support phone line and one shared email address, both branded to the Hudson H.U.D.D.L.E. and backed by a clear standard: every message answered within one working day. Many problems can be solved, redirected, or booked into a H.U.D.D.L.E. slot without anyone getting in a car or taking time off work.
The H.U.D.D.L.E. is not new, and proven elsewhere. One-stop shops are now standard instruments of competent governance, studied across more than seventy countries. In municipalities under 20,000 inhabitants, one-stop service desks cut administrative burdens by 40â60 percent and informal payments by roughly half, as Brazilâs Poupatempo rollout shows in a rigorous 2020 difference-in-differences study. OECD and World Bank evidence finds the highest marginal gains in small, siloed towns where compliance costs otherwise crush local enterprise. The results show up in the data: shorter queues, fewer trips, faster processing, higher satisfaction, and cleaner oversight. Citizens gain when government simplifies. Departments gain when they concentrate their attention instead of losing entire days to drip-feed interruptions.
A weekly Hudson H.U.D.D.L.E. also strengthens the civic bloodstream and interdepartmental camaraderie and collaboration. Departments heads talk. Staff cross-pollinate. Patterns surface early, from inspections and billing to permits and taxes. It doubles as an invitation for residents to come âhuddleâ with civil servants rather than chase them across town. We defer to the mayor and the department heads on the exact schedule, but imagine this happening every Tuesday from 9am to 3pm. Staff break for a shared lunch that is both fun and productive, swapping ideas and solving problems together, which then makes the rest of the week in their own offices quieter, more focused, and more effective. Local businesses can sponsor lunch (below $75) to stay within ethics rules.
**Batching interactions in a single window each week, for both residents and staff, reduces context switching, cuts errors, and lets everyone get more done with less chaos.** City Hall should benefit from the same logic that already works in every well-run factory and office.
One desk, one day, one service email, one place. Residents stop chasing City Hall. City Hall starts operating like a unified institution rather than a loose federation of doors. We would propose calling this the âHudson Genius Bar(n),â but we do not want Kamal and his nativist tendencies to be unnecessarily aroused.
A Weekly Hudson Email and Blog Covering Every Taxpayer-Funded Meeting and Move
Area of Responsibility (AoR): Mayorâs Office
Implementer: Mayor + City Clerk + Mayoral Aide?
Hudson should not require residents to hunt across Facebook groups, scattered City Hall posts, or a broken app to see how their money is used. Public information belongs in open formats anyone can read and search: email, public calendars, and a clear website. These neutral protocols work on any device, with no need to log in to a private platform. No âblockingâ or critics.
The rule is simple. If an activity, meeting, program, or service receives even one dollar of taxpayer funding, it goes into the official City Hall email, the official calendar, and the official website. Council meetings, board sessions, hearings, city-funded festivals, pilots, arts grants, quasi-public services. If taxpayers pay, it appears in the same place, every time. A well designed and consistent format and information hierarchy, and scheduled to go on the exact same time and day, will both make it easier to create and consume.
Hudsonâs information ecosystem is fragmented. Critical updates sit on semi-private channels, wasting the time of people who are actually working and paying for the system. The fix is to treat communication as infrastructure. The mayor issues one universal weekly or monthly email and blog post, sent to inboxes and published online with a searchable archive. Each issue looks back at achievements and actions, and looks forward at plans and expectations. It includes meetings ahead, decisions made, and brief, plain-language updates from department heads on public safety, public works, housing, and other services. Residents know where to look. Officials field fewer âdid this happen?â calls. Departments plan around a shared rhythm.
Many cities already do this. Portsmouth, NH, sends a clean municipal email that centralizes public information and acts as a living ledger of city life (you can find a great example here). Hudson can copy this model at negligible cost.
To keep the signal sharp, the city should draw a line between public and private communication. Private events, commercial promotions, and not-for-profit happenings should use independent newsletters and social feeds. City infrastructure is neutral and non-partisan.
A unified, tax-funded email and calendar reduce Hudsonâs dependence on Facebook as the de facto notification system. The Gossips of Rivertown has done heroic work consolidating information, which only highlights City Hallâs failure to do so. A functional city does not outsource its communications spine to one great blog and a broken app.
One outward-facing update forces coordination among department heads, surfaces what has fallen through the cracks, key meetings, and creates a time-stamped trail of what the city said it would do. A well-run city tells residents, plainly and publicly, what it is doing with their money. Hudson should start with one official email and one official record on a predictable rhythm.
Good news is that incoming Mayor Joe Ferris has already committed to this idea on the campaign trail and made clear communication a cornerstone of his campaign.
Area of Responsibility (AoR): Mayor + Common Council President + City Clerk
Implementer: Mayor + CC President + City Clerk
Hudson needs one accurate calendar that governs every board and committee. All meetings should occur at 7pm on Tuesdays and Wednesdays, capped at one hour or less, except in rare, pre-announced cases. The specific distribution across weeks can vary, but the rhythm must be absolute. A resident should be able to know, without checking a website, that city business happens at a fixed time on fixed days with fixed weekly assignment. Week 1 of the month for X, Week 3 of the month for Y.
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Hudson runs too many meetings, often at irregular hours, announced through inconsistent channels. The result is predictable: residents spend more time searching for information than participating. Lawyers bill extra hours. Staff lose evenings. Only a small set of hyper-available activists can reliably show up and shape policy. That is not civic engagement, but a barrier to entry. There are very few residents who, professionally and personally, are free on a Wednesday morning at 9:30am (IDA), as well as a Tuesday evening from 7pm until 11pm? (Planning Board), and Friday at 10am (Historic Preservation).
The economic and efficiency logic is also simple. Predictable scheduling reduces coordination costs. It widens the pool of qualified board members because competent adults with demanding jobs can commit to a one-hour monthly meeting, not a 15â20 hour burden scattered across irregular slots. It also restores order inside City Hall. If internal coordination lands on Mondays, and public decisions land mid-week, the government gains a stable cadence for both preparation and action.
A unified calendar with fewer meetings, at fixed times, strengthens accountability because it removes confusion as a political tool. No surprise hearings, no last-minute Facebook notices, no weekday-morning meetings that exclude working taxpayers. Public money requires public access, and access requires predictability.
A well-designed civic calendar is a time-saving device. Hudson should build one that treats residentsâ time as a finite and valuable resource.
Area of Responsibility (AoR): City Clerk, Mayorâs Office
Implementer: City Clerk + Mayor
Hudson should adopt a universal platform and one permanent public link used for every virtual or hybrid meeting. It can be as simple as CityofHudson.org/meet or a short, memorable URL (HudsonCityHall.org) saved once and relied on for years.
At present, Hudson uses ever-changing Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Google Meet links for different committees and town hall meetings. This digital sprawl wastes staff time and deters residents who simply want to attend a meeting without hunting through Facebook threads or outdated website posts (though we remain ever-grateful for the Gossips of Rivertown who, without fail, provides residents with the relevant links in the weekly âMeetings and Events in the Week Ahead.â) A city of 5,800 does not need a platform buffet. It needs one front door.
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Side note: For some reason the City of Hudson website and calendar is blocked internationally. So if a Common Council member or resident is abroad for work or leisure they canât easily find information or login last minute. This is an easy fix for the Cityâs IT Department.
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Two designated virtual City Hall rooms would host all streamed meetings, each with the same unchanging link. Staff stop juggling logins. Residents stop guessing where to click. Outside attorneys and consultants stop asking which platform to use each month.
Predictability is a civic service. Early New England understood that shared schedules and clear signals reduce friction, create trust, and free people to focus on real work instead of chasing information. Hudson should do the same with its digital infrastructure.
A universal link expands public access because it levels the playing field. Technically capable residents attend easily. Time-constrained residents can plan their evenings (and they could plan even better if the Common Council also implemented our Idea #3, read more above â«âŠ). Tech inexperienced residents avoid platform confusion. The public sees a government that respects their time.
One city. One link. One virtual dial-in process. Streamlined systems raise the performance of institutions, and the gains compound across every meeting and every department.