Robert Campbell is not new to writing town charters, an experience he believes will come in handy as the community’s Charter Commission moves forward.

Campbell, a former selectman and current member of the Planning Board, chaired the commission in the late ’90s that established the first town charter in Salem. Serving again as chairman of Salem’s newly elected nine-member charter commission, Campbell said the past experience had left him with a strong understanding of the state statutes regulating municipal government and an idea of how to produce a document that voters will accept at next year’s Town Meeting.

“I know what can be done, and one of the things that is important is to communicate what are the options. It isn’t the sort of thing where you can start out with a blank sheet of paper. The state gives us a restricted outline,” he said.

“One needs to have a little bit of discussion to find out what direction we’re going to go. We can’t be flailing around on six different possibilities for four months. We have to develop a consensus or majority of what people are going to support and then start fleshing it out.”

According to Campbell, the commission has a wide latitude on what changes to make in the town charter.

The commission could recommend minor tweaks to the current document or adopt one of six basic forms of municipal government in New Hampshire.

That could mean potentially turning from the town meeting and board of selectmen to a town council or city council.

At the moment, nothing is off the table, according to Campbell. The focus for the next month or so is on developing a majority within the commission on what direction they want to take the town charter, he said.

Campbell anticipates that much of the discussion will revolve around how much power voters should have in the future when it comes to the budget and other spending proposals.

“One of the patterns you’ll see, the people who are in government tend to want to have a council type of government that gives them the power to directly implement their programs. The people who are marginally on the outside want to say, ‘I don’t want to give them that power. I want to keep this to the voters,’” he said. “It’s that tension that is going to cause much of the discussion in the months ahead.”

The commission has roughly six months to review the current charter, study alternatives and take public input before turning out a rough draft of recommendations that will go before voters in March. Residents will have the final say on whether to accept the commission’s findings.

The key to gaining voter approval for any alterations to the town charter is to keep it simple, Campbell said.

“We have had a lot of charter commissions in Salem over the last 30 years or so. The commission about 10 years ago was the first people had approved,” he said.

Earlier proposed charters could run as long as 60 pages and were met with defeat. In the late ’90s, Campbell said his goal was to keep the document small enough to fit on a single sheet of paper. Short and simple is the way to go this time around as well, he said.

“It’s like the Constitution, it’s not every last policy and procedure,” Campbell said. “I’d like to gain enough consensus on the commission and in the community so that it will pass.”