Town meeting time

As winter wanes, it will soon be time for that predictable rite of spring, the annual town meeting.

Town meetings, of course, are the legislative branch of small town government in Massachusetts. They’re the counterpart of the city councils found in the larger communities of New England and common in all other parts of the country. Under the open town meeting form of government, any voter can show up and be a “legislator for a day,” considering budgets and bylaws and various other business.

Some towns have a representative town meeting government, where individuals are elected by precinct to represent the voters at town meeting. Among the 30 towns in Berkshire County, 28 have open town meetings and two have the representative form, Adams and Lee. But the concept is the same, and these representative town meetings can have anywhere from several dozen to a couple hundred elected voting members.

A perpetual problem with town meetings, however, is trying to ensure that a substantial portion of the voters actually attend the meeting. It can be a problem in representative town meetings, but it’s even more difficult in open town meetings, where the legislative body consists solely of whichever voters decide to show up.

The Great Barrington and Dalton selectmen have both taken steps recently to try to increase voter turnout. In Great Barrington, they will be moving the annual town meeting to the centrally located and historic Mahaiwe Theater, with the hope that residents will find it more convenient than the regional high school and the theater’s sheer beauty will attract residents who have not previously enjoyed a performance there.

In Dalton, the selectmen have decided to load up the annual town meeting warrant with as much of the town’s business as possible and try to avoid special town meetings, which can be called with 14 days notice and often have even lower voter turnout than regularly scheduled annual meetings.

The problem with trying to put all of a town’s business into a single meeting, however, is that it can cause an annual meeting to run on for hours, taxing the patience of even the most dedicated voter and the backside of anyone who has to sit through one of these marathons in a metal folding chair.

Two “annual” meetings

A few towns in the eastern part of the state have gone in the opposite direction. They have written into their bylaws a provision that sets the dates for two “annual” town meetings each year, the traditional one in the spring to consider the upcoming fiscal year budget and a second one in the fall to deal with bylaw changes or large expenditures like new buildings. This often eliminates the need for special town meetings, which busy voters can’t always shuffle their schedules to attend, even with 14 days notice.

Other measures to increase town meeting attendance include offering rides to the meeting and providing babysitting services to parents who wish to participate.

However, the most critical factor in ensuring a solid turnout at town meeting is an informed and interested voter. Pre-town meeting hearings; newspaper, email and website notices; and mailing actual copies of warrants to each household all help.

Every year or two, some town in Massachusetts goes through the process to eliminate its town meeting and become a city. In most cases, the town just becomes too big for a traditional board of selectmen and town meeting to handle, and a mayor and city council would make more sense. In a few cases, unfortunately, the voters toss out their town meeting when it’s the voters themselves who fail to make the system function properly.

If the town meeting is to survive as a citizen legislature, then it’s up to the town’s citizen legislators to make it work.

Posted by Bruce Garlow on March 14, 2013. Filed under Berkshire Beacon Hill Spotlight,Columns,Opinion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry