Open town meetings in New England were already 225 years old when canonized by Henry David Thoreau in a speech he delivered in 1854: “When, in some obscure country town, the farmers come together to a special town meeting, to express their opinion on some subject which is vexing the land, that, I think, is the true Congress, and the most respectable one that is ever assembled in the United States.“
The open town meetings we cherish have a lot going for them: They’re picturesque and nostalgic, they rest on a New England granite–solid base of Puritan principle, and the language describing the practice is clear and enticing. We live, work, and govern in the same space, we know what each decision means across a community of neighbors, and we keep responsibility for our lives close to home.
At its heart, direct representative government succeeds when citizens have a more or less personal stake in and understanding of every decision. The system works because the range of citizen responsibility for town governance coincides closely with personal interest and personal competence, and therefore citizens show up and vote.
What’s more, the town meeting form of direct local government isn’t optional; Massachusetts law is so attached to it that open town meetings, in which all eligible voters can show up and have a say, is the only allowable form of governance for towns with fewer than 6,000 residents. Not representative town meetings, where only elected representatives get to vote, and certainly not more typical forms of mayor/council/executive governance. And no exceptions.
While appreciating the virtues of direct participation in every town governance and budget decision, community changes over 400 years — especially on an Island of 16,000 distributed among six small towns — have placed considerable stresses on this basic underpinning, where there is no elected legislature — just volunteer selectmen. The complexity and the scale of challenges facing Islanders sorely taxes (no pun intended) the capacity of selectmen, small professional staffs, and multitasking citizens to tackle large-scale problems like water treatment facilities, environmental protection, year-round housing shortages, immigration policies, public health emergencies like opioid addiction, and economic development.
As town issues grow more complex — say, from grazing rights on the village green to nitrogen loading or wastewater or Islander housing — the demands placed on voters and on elected officials go up, dependence on short-staffed committees grows, and supervisory requirements for technical and expensive salaried operational departments increase substantially. In short, the practice of town management and the underlying voter support required to understand it and finance it all are increasingly out of step with the annual gathering of Thoreau’s noble agrarians. Two areas of concern — low voter turnout and the absence of competitive elections — make the point.
The Island’s first three town meetings — Edgartown, Oak Bluffs, and West Tisbury — occurred this Tuesday (and Wednesday, in Oak Bluffs), with elections to follow today. Between 8 percent and 9 percent of eligible voters showed up at each meeting. The rate of participation would be about half that, should the exclusion of nonresident taxpayers be accounted for.
So 9 out of 10 of us defer to friends, neighbors, and interested single-issue residents to call the shots for local planning, policy, and spending. The community members who participate are probably not likely to be a fair sample of each town’s population, and so the results are skewed. And since there’s no meaningful governance at the county level, and we have a regional planning agency designed to supersede town authority, the idea of powerful, direct citizen governance is largely illusory. We Islanders place our civic fate in the hands of minority-elected selectmen and the relative handful of intrepid souls who show up to vote on each town’s warrant.
A second powerful factor in the decline of the effectiveness of local governance is the general absence of contested elections across all town offices. One selectman’s seat is being contested in West Tisbury today, along with one library trustee seat; in Edgartown there’s just a lone contest for planning board; and in Oak Bluffs, three candidates are vying for two selectmen’s seats.The elections to follow in Aquinnah, Chilmark, and Tisbury offer more of the same. Few or no contests deprive us of new ideas and comparisons, and it relegates those with new or opposing ideas to outsider status. And the more we rely on the same old faces, and the same old ideas, the fewer new folks will show up, and the voter turnout will diminish even more.
Housing and moped elimination are two ready examples of citizens being out ahead of town government. Most of us want to get more housing built, and recognize the kinds of changes that will require. And few of us can understand why we need to support the moped rental business. We’ve passed an inflection point in public opinion, but we’re stuck, relying on nonbinding resolutions to simply make a point to elected leaders that they need to catch up with us.
The best hopes for reversing this risk-averse and timid leadership are incremental, since structural changes in state law are unlikely. And improvements need a collection of ideas. To start the conversation, it would help if selectmen recognized the problem in the first place. Real recruitment for town positions would help. Tutorials for the community at large — not just explaining the warrant articles but explaining the issues — might get folks out, or at least would encourage more care in drafting warrants in the first place. Perhaps MVTV could be put to good use. Maybe selectmen should receive a stipend. And in this Internet era perhaps web forums, live conferences, and maybe even online informational ballots could help connect citizens and government in new ways. Sprucing up a system devised 400 years ago, which clearly weighs us down, seems long overdue.
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