This morning, lead complainant Mark Sanderson hand-delivered a formal, notarized regulatory complaint to the State Elections Enforcement Commission (SEEC) offices in Hartford regarding the statutory failures described in this report. The SEEC formally acknowledged receipt of the complaint upon delivery. Concurrently, an identical complaint was officially filed with and accepted by the Secretary of the State's (SOTS) Elections Division. Residents wishing to add their names as official co-complainants to the SOTS filing—which simultaneously registers them as corroborating citizen witnesses to the SEEC complaint—should contact the Dispatch directly. We will report on the state's response as these regulatory matters develop.
THE BLOOMFIELD PARADOX: How Bloomfield's Municipal Machine Made A Voter Referendum Disappear and Allowed the Town Manager to Keep His Job. Here's What the Documents Show.
(Part 1): How a Voter Mandate Vanished Between the Council Chamber and the Ballot Box
By Peter C. Frank
Editor-in-Chief | March 31, 2026
EDITOR’S NOTE & MAJOR CORRECTION (April 1, 2026):
Transparency and factual accuracy are the foundational principles of The Bloomfield Community Dispatch. Shortly after the initial publication of this article on March 31, 2026, diligent members of our community correctly pointed out a critical factual error regarding Section 502 of the proposed Charter Revision.
We originally reported that the final proposed draft approved by the Town Council on August 11, 2025, retained the Town Manager residency requirement. A subsequent review of the municipal archives confirms this was incorrect. The proposed draft slated for the ballot did, in fact, remove the residency requirement. We sincerely apologize for this error. The text of the article below is currently being updated to reflect the accurate legislative record.
What this means for our investigation:
While this correction alters the administration's motive, it does not change the core statutory failure: The Town Administration still failed to execute a legally mandated, ministerial duty under CGS § 9-369a to transmit the binding referendum to the Secretary of the State. The ballot still vanished. The electorate was still bypassed.
However, the motive for this suppression is far more complex—and potentially more systemic—than a simple cover-up for the Town Manager.
If the proposed Charter removed the residency requirement, its failure to reach the ballot actually left the Town Manager legally vulnerable under the active Charter. Why let it die? As community watchdogs have highlighted, the proposed Charter Revision was largely a "People's Document" that limited Council overreach and failed to deliver power-consolidating measures to the dominant voting bloc—most notably, their desire to eliminate the elected Library Board of Trustees.
Knowing that the removal of the residency requirement was a "deal-breaker" for residents and would likely cause the entire Charter to fail at the polls, the Council's five affirmative votes to advance the referendum appear to have been procedural theater. The evidence now suggests the referendum was intentionally allowed to die in transit to quietly kill a document the administration ultimately despised, thereby avoiding a highly public electoral defeat.
We are immediately advising lead complainant Mark Sanderson to amend his formal regulatory complaints with the State Elections Enforcement Commission (SEEC) and the Secretary of the State (SOTS) to reflect this corrected evidentiary baseline. Part 2 of this series will pivot to investigate this broader narrative of legislative sabotage.
BLOOMFIELD, CT -- In the annals of municipal governance, the unwritten contract between the electorate and its administration relies on a fundamental premise: when the legislative body speaks, the administrative arm executes. In Bloomfield, Connecticut, that contract has seemingly been shredded, replaced by an "administrative veto" that operates in the shadows to serve the interests of the executive at the direct expense of the voters.
Over the past year, the Town of Bloomfield has been plunged into a deepening constitutional and financial crisis. At the center of the storm is Town Manager Alvin D. Schwapp, Jr., an administration whose failure to execute a legally binding voter referendum effectively denied Bloomfield's electorate its right to vote on changes to the town's own governing document, and a deeply conflicted "Machine Dynamic" that has allowed such interference to go unchecked.
In response to our initial inquiry, Town Councilor Joe Merritt alleged that the failure to transmit the ballot was a clerical error, attempting to lay the blame on the Town Clerk's office. However, Town Clerk Andrea DiStephan immediately replied on the record, explicitly rejecting this accusation by stating: "there was not an oversight by the Town Clerk."
Following this internal contradiction, the Dispatch extended one final opportunity to Town Manager Alvin D. Schwapp, Jr. and Mayor Harrington to clarify how the mandate died if it was not under the Clerk's purview. Town Manager Schwapp explicitly declined to address the allegations, stating on the record: "I have no comment, please do not stop the presses for me."
The Vanishing Ballot
The crisis originated with the Town Council’s meticulous, multi-year process to update the Town Charter. The legislative record proves this was not a fleeting idea or a single procedural maneuver. Across a ten-month span, the Town Council took five distinct, formal votes to mandate the referendum.
On October 16, 2024, the Council took three specific votes: declaring no further revisions were needed, accepting the Final Report of the Charter Revision Commission, and formally scheduling the report for the November 2025 municipal election.
On August 11, 2025, the Council cemented this mandate with two final votes, unanimously approving the specific ballot question language and unanimously approving its placement on the November 2025 ballot.
By law under Connecticut General Statutes § 9-369a, the municipal clerk is mandated to transmit the ballot question to the Secretary of the State at least forty-five days prior to the election. It is a strictly ministerial duty; the Town Administration possesses no legal authority to intercept, evaluate, or halt a legislatively approved referendum.
Yet, when Bloomfield voters arrived at the polls in November 2025, the Charter Revision question was entirely absent. The mandate died in transit, with the Town Manager's office positioned as the ultimate beneficiary. Had the filing been transmitted and received by the Secretary of State's office, the question would have appeared on the November 2025 ballot by operation of law. It did not appear. The filing was never made.
The "Procedural" Cover-Up: The Section 502 Do-Over
The Town Administration has since attempted to quietly dismiss this failure of the democratic process as a mere "administrative oversight" or a clerical error during a transition in the Town Clerk's office.
However, an investigation by the Bloomfield Community Dispatch into municipal communications, legislative transcripts, and the Town's own public records reveals a far more disturbing reality. The evidence suggests the 2025 Charter Revision was not merely lost to a clerical error, but was derailed after it failed to do the one thing the administration needed it to do: provide legal cover for the Town Manager.
The Vulnerability: Section 502
To understand why the referendum disappeared, one must look at what the 2024–2025 Charter Revision Commission refused to change.
The residency conflict was first raised publicly by Bloomfield resident Bob Berman at the January 12, 2026, Special Meeting of the Town Council, where he alleged on the record that the Town Manager was in violation of the Charter's residency requirement. The Dispatch independently confirmed those allegations through public voter registration records.
The motive for keeping Section 502 off the ballot becomes clear when one examines the Town Manager's own voter registration. Under Section 502 of Bloomfield's active Town Charter, the Town Manager is required to reside within town limits. Public voter registration records show that Schwapp is not registered in Bloomfield — but in Simsbury, Connecticut, a neighboring town where he maintains his legal residence.
The town manager’s official biography on the town website confirms he moved to Simsbury in 2008. Public voter-registration records show he remains registered there.
Under Section 502, this is not merely a residency technicality. It places the Town Manager's continued employment in direct legal conflict with the town's own governing document.
Documents from the spring of 2024 confirm that the Town Council's original charge to the first Charter Revision Commission explicitly directed them to review the residency requirement. The intent was clear: change the Charter to retroactively legalize the Town Manager's employment status.
The Commission initially entertained the idea. However, during the public comment periods in the summer of 2024, the residents of Bloomfield pushed back aggressively. Taxpayers demanded that the executive leader of their municipal government actually live within the community they govern. Conceding to the public's will, the Commission reversed course.
When the final draft of the revised Charter was submitted and unanimously approved by the Town Council on August 11, 2025, Section 502 remained completely intact. The residency requirement survived, leaving the administration legally vulnerable.
The "Mechanical Gap"
Following the binding August 11th vote, the Town Clerk's Office was required by state statute (CGS § 9-369a) to transmit the question to the Connecticut Secretary of the State at least forty-five days prior to the election — a standard, mandatory administrative function. The Dispatch has contacted the Secretary of the State's office to confirm the precise statutory deadline and will update this report upon receiving their on-the-record clarification.
What is not in dispute is the outcome: the paperwork was never filed, the deadline expired, and voters never saw the question. The electorate was entirely bypassed, and the legislation that would have cemented the residency requirement into the modernized Charter was effectively killed behind closed doors. The exact mechanics of how this occurred, and how the Town Manager's office exerted influence over the Town Clerk's ministerial duties, will be detailed comprehensively in Part 2 of this series.
The Expert Verdict: Official Misconduct and The Machine
Dr. James Newman, a political science and public administration expert interviewed by the Dispatch, views the failure to place the approved question on the ballot with concern.
From a public administration standpoint, Newman characterized the conduct as consistent with the definition of official misconduct — though he noted it would not meet the definition of election fraud, which requires manipulating the election's process rather than its outcome. "It is not legal for a Town Clerk or Town Manager to ignore a state directive," Newman stated. Whether the conduct rises to a legal violation under Connecticut law is now before the SEEC.
Newman called the interception of a ministerial duty legally assigned to an elected Town Clerk "highly unusual behavior on the part of a Town Manager."
According to Newman, Bloomfield is suffering from an extreme case of political capture. The Town Council—operating under a cross-party supermajority that routinely overrides its two dissenting members—has routinely failed to act as a check on the Town Manager's authority. Recently, this same Council broke nearly two centuries of tradition to bypass the top vote-getter in the mayoral election to install a party loyalist.
"[A dominant voting bloc] creates an environment ripe for a lack of transparency and accountability unless there is a clear fracture within the dominant [faction]," Newman explains. "When there is a [dominant voting bloc], it is difficult to create a checks and balances system in which the different branches of government... have an incentive to monitor elected officials in the same [faction]."
The Section 502 Do-Over
If any doubt remained about the administration's motive following the ballot failure, their actions in the first quarter of 2026 bring the situation into sharp relief.
Rather than taking accountability for the statutory failure, the administration initiated what it called a fresh start. On January 28, 2026, Town Manager Schwapp issued an internal memo — issued after the November ballot failure — that later described the Council's unanimous, binding August vote as merely a "procedural step" (page 18), laying the groundwork to scrap the suppressed 2025 document entirely and "reconstitute" a new commission.
Days later, on February 2, 2026, the Town Council majority executed that exact plan. They officially scrapped the 2025 revisions and seated a new commission.
Crucially, the administration did not just ask this new commission to pick up where the last one left off. They issued them a new set of directives. Read aloud into the public record by Mayor Harrington, Charge #3 for the new commission is explicitly:
"Review Section 502 to consider removing residency requirement for Town Manager."
The cycle has begun again. The administration successfully bypassed a November referendum that did not serve their interests, and they are now utilizing municipal resources to force a second commission to do what the first commission refused to do.
The paper trail points to one conclusion: the 2025 referendum was not lost. They are calling it an oversight, but Charge #3 tells a different story. It was removed.
Formal Complaints Executed
Late this morning, lead complainant Mark Sanderson took the first formal step toward regulatory accountability. Sanderson hand-delivered a formal, notarized regulatory complaint to the State Elections Enforcement Commission (SEEC) offices on Farmington Avenue in Hartford. Sanderson served as the sole sworn complainant on the official SEEC intake form, which was supported by the evidentiary record compiled by the Dispatch through months of investigative reporting.
A concurrent complaint containing this exact evidentiary record is being filed directly with the Secretary of the State (SOTS) Elections Division. Residents who wish to add their names to the community pushback will be signing on as official co-complainants to the SOTS filing, which simultaneously registers them as corroborating citizen witnesses to the complaint now before the SEEC, should the Commission choose to open a formal investigation.
In Part 2 of this series, the Dispatch will move from administrative failure to legislative complicity — examining how the Town Council's cross-party supermajority functioned not as a check on executive power, but as a shield for it. The documents are damning. The admissions are worse.
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