The Future of Town Meeting?

Hope everyone is enjoying the Fall and looking forward to Town Meeting next Monday night, October 18, 2010.

My colleague, Moderator Joe Harrington from Westborough, recently wrote a thought-provoking editorial about the future of Town Meeting. While the first section of the piece discusses why Westbourough should remain an open town meeting rather than representative, keep reading, becase the rest of the article raises some very relevant issues.

I'll just jump ahead and state that I agree 110% with Mr. Harrington's last two paragraphs, subtitled, What’s so special about town meeting, and why should we keep it?. Town Meeting is a form of self-government that we should cherish, protect and never abandon!

Here is the full article:

By Joe Harrington/Town Meeting Moderator
GateHouse News Service
Posted Oct 02, 2010 @ 12:26 PM

WESTBOROUGH — What’s the future of town meeting in Westborough? Many were asking this question after last May’s lightly-attended annual town meeting. It’s worth some more thought and discussion as we approach the fall special town meeting scheduled for Tuesday, Oct. 12, because we have options. I’d like to share some ideas for things we might do right now and some options for the intermediate and long-term as well.

Open town meeting, representative town meeting, or city government?

Every Massachusetts municipality has a legislative branch in its government, to do such things as allocate funds to various purposes, make and amend bylaws, and act as a check on executive authority. Westborough’s legislature is its “open” town meeting, where any registered voter may attend, speak, and vote. It deals with such matters as our children’s schools; the condition of our roads and water supplies; the level of police, fire, and ambulance protection we wish to have; and the quality of life in our community as it develops.

No one person or group controls. The elected selectmen set the time, place, and the agenda, which limits what the meeting may consider, and with the town manager, they often take the lead on key issues. The clerk and the registrars of voters establish the voting list, and the clerk has sole control of the record of the meeting. An independent, elected moderator controls procedure, and names an independent advisory board to provide recommendations to the voters. The voters decide the outcomes.

Westborough’s population is approaching 20,000. If we consider the list of Massachusetts towns with populations between 15,000 and 20,000, we find that most of the others utilize open town meeting as do we. In the 20,000-25,000 bracket, about half the towns have open town meeting, while the other half have “representative” town meeting. If we were to adopt this form of town meeting, as have Shrewsbury, Lexington, and some 38 other Massachusetts towns, each of our five precincts would elect a list of representatives. The number of representatives per precinct would likely be between 40 and 60. Any interested citizen could attend and possibly even speak, but only the elected representatives would vote.

Not much would appear to change, at first. I believe that if we were to consider one possible future scenario and look in on a representative town meeting in Westborough, we would see pretty much the same people that we’ve seen at decently-attended meetings in the past few years. The ones who care enough to come to town meeting regularly now would be the ones who would care enough to get the 10-15 signatures necessary to get their names on the ballot. Those who seldom have time enough to come now would be unlikely to make the commitment to regular attendance implied by running for representative. So I don’t believe the makeup of the meeting, relative to those we see these days on an average, routine night, would really change much.

The big difference would appear the first time that a hot button issue (e.g., a contested school budget) came up. Interested citizens could attend, perhaps even speak. But only the opinions of the 200-300 elected representatives would matter, because nobody else would be allowed to vote. Give some thought to how some of our issues might have turned out in the past, had only regular town meeting goers been permitted to vote.

The third option for the legislative body in a Massachusetts municipality is a city council. It might consist of 10-15 councilors, and would play the role now taken by our town meeting. The 5-person board of selectmen would be replaced by a mayor, with or without a city manager. I haven’t met many people who think Westborough ought to become a city, and I certainly don’t. But that’s the third of the three options we have.

I have met plenty of people who believe that representative town meeting is the way we should go. My personal belief is that until such time as attendance at town meeting regularly requires the use of two halls—and we’re not in any danger of that!--open town meeting can serve us well, if we stay alert to possibilities for improvement.

What can we do right now to improve open town meeting?

Of our approximately 11,000 registered voters, between 1percent and 2.5 percent were on hand during the three sessions of this year’s annual town meeting on May 15 and 17. In the past, several times this number was routinely present. And 8-10 years ago, when numerous school issues faced the town, we often overflowed the high school auditorium. With as many as 1,500 voters present, up to half the voters participated from the cafeteria or gymnasium.

Was it the timing of last May’s meeting? A survey taken over the summer indicated that some respondents think so. In 2004 we switched from March to May because severe uncertainty over state aid (typically about one-third of our total revenue) was lasting deeper and deeper into the spring. Under an article on the warrant for the October 12 special meeting, we’ll once again be discussing shifting the date of the annual town meeting, with an eye to improving attendance.

What else might we consider, to make our open town meeting work better? Well, we could decide to start the meetings on time. Our by-laws state that we may not start until a quorum, or minimum number of voters, is present. At last May’s annual town meeting we spent an average of 20 minutes at the start of each of the three sessions waiting for a quorum to assemble. I believe we should reduce that number from 100 to zero at least for the annual meeting and the regular fall meeting.

The usual first reaction to this is to express the fear that it would allow a small group to convene and vote terrible things in secret, but there is no secret about when these meetings are held; it is stated right in the bylaws. Official postings are required at Town Hall and the Library. This leads to meetings being noticed on the Internet, on Westborough TV, and in the two daily and two weekly newspapers that serve our area.

Other towns that have adopted zero quorums typically report that the change leads to better attendance. Why? Because people know that the meeting will start on time. We spent a total of 11½ hours on the May annual town meeting, totaling the time from the posted start to the end of each session, and as earlier noted, an hour of that was devoted to waiting for a quorum to be present.

It’s time to start our meetings at the posted time, and recalibrate people’s expectations of when things will begin to happen. Otherwise, we’ll waste more and more time, as people adjust their arrival times later and later, in keeping with reality. It’s unfair to those who do show up on time. So I asked the Selectmen to insert an article in the warrant for the upcoming special town meeting that would allow us to switch to a zero quorum at least for the two regularly scheduled meetings each year, and I’ll be asking for your vote on the matter on October 12.

This shouldn’t be necessary. We should easily be able to muster 100 on-time voters (and more!). But the town is well run, and in the absence of hot button issues, and in the presence of the many distractions that call people to other pursuits, the voters seem to be entrusting the handling of town meeting issues to the few who care enough to appear. If the rest are willing to leave it to us, at least let us start on time

“Why don’t we just do it all on the Internet?”

The day will come, at some future time when access to the Internet (or whatever replaces it) is universal, when we will easily be able to replicate the town meeting experience without leaving our homes. The essence of that experience is that the topics (but not necessarily the specific proposals) are noticed well in advance; every voter has a right to participate; participants debate; and they vote after shaping the specifics of the proposal. Technically it is possible to do this on line today, at least on a modest scale. However our society is not ready for it; we would be disenfranchising the many who lack Internet access, or who are unfamiliar with or uncomfortable with computers. On the other hand, bear in mind that we disenfranchise today those who are truly unable to be at town meeting in person because of job-related travel, health issues, or dependent care considerations (for examples).

If the Internet is indeed the long-term future, how will the transition come about? One small step in this direction could be electronic voting at our existing meeting. Hand-held devices would allow voters to register their votes electronically and instantly, saving the time during the meeting that we now spend with hand-counting of votes. Such a system would make every vote a secret ballot, and that could change the dynamic of town meeting—some would say for the better. It would be an expensive proposition, but there is talk of sharing such devices among towns, to reduce the costs per town.

Much farther in the future would be the option for voters to observe the proceedings via TV or on a computer screen as many already do, but then to contribute to the discussion from their respective remote locations, and vote as well. This is a much more formidable challenge and I don’t think we’ll see this at our meeting any time soon, but it’s not an unrealistic option in the long-term future. My fervent hope is that when this sort of change is proposed for Massachusetts town meetings, it will not be controlled by people who know all about computers but who aren’t clear about what is important in the town meeting process.

What’s so special about town meeting, and why should we keep it?

Town meeting is special and unique in that it lets the people most directly affected by the issues make the actual decision. We have this privilege because we live in a place that was settled from England centuries ago, where citizens were very used to this manner of settling local questions. In other parts of the country, they either never had this tradition, or they lost it. It takes work, to make it work, but for nearly three centuries we have made it work. Will you be part of it, by attending the Oct. 12 town meeting? Will Westborough still have this privilege, 10 or 20 or 30 years from now?

As I noted at the start, we have options and should think about them. We shouldn’t keep town meeting for the sake of history; we should keep it for its intrinsic merits. It is well worth preserving, and we should make the adjustments that will make it work in the context of contemporary society. If we ever give it up, it will not be long before we’ll be saying “Why did we ever agree to give up the right to be heard and to vote on these local matters that we know about first-hand, and that matter so much to us? Why did we settle for being like the rest of the country, writing letters to our representatives and hoping they listen, rather than casting our own votes?”

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