A look at the town’s charter by the new town manager has revealed the Municipal Budget Committee has no standing in the town’s government operations.

According to an interpretation of state laws, Salem Town Manager Jonathan Sistare said the town’s chosen charter was never approved at the state level to work with a budget committee.

“I came across the statute that is basically outdated,” said Sistare, an attorney who was hired as town manager last fall.

Sistare said Selectman Michael Lyons had asked about amending the town’s bond approval threshold from two-thirds to three-fifths after the town’s second police station proposal failed in four years.

Upon his research, Sistare found that state laws did not prescribe a Budget Committee for the current charter Salem uses, and four out of five attorneys the town consulted agreed, according to Selectman Chairman Elizabeth Roth.

Roth, also an attorney, said either the town has to change its charter or legislators have to change the state law to allow the committee to function as it has in annual budget approvals.

“No court is going to crawl into the skin of legislators and interpret this law for us,” she said.

The legislative oversight, according to Sistare and Roth, could cause problems for any Budget Committee that operates under a town charter without the typical Town Meeting and representative forms of government.

Since 1996, Salem has operated under an amended SB2 charter that calls for two deliberative sessions in addition to ballot voting in determining the budget each year.

Budget Committee member Stephen Campbell said the committee’s authority should be assumed to include Salem’s charter and that voters who ratified it in 1996 were told the change wouldn’t affect the nine-person committee’s power.

“If the town manager is right, that means that vote should be called in question and bring back the previous charter,” Campbell said.

The suggestion that the Budget Committee has no power, Campbell said, was a reaction among selectmen recouping from the failure of a $7 million bond for a new police station last month.

“It just sounds like sour grapes to make it easier in the future,” Campbell said. “The two-thirds majority is a problem, the Budget Committee is a problem, now letting people vote and decide is a problem.”

Sistare said the revelation isn’t going to be used to shut the committee out but instead show a need for a charter reform committee to consider changes.

“The way we’re looking at it, there is a problem with the law,” Sistare said.”What we need to do to fix it is work cooperatively rather than working adversely in the town.”