The warrant for Harvard’s Annual Town Meeting, including some 45 articles for voters’ consideration, was signed by the Selectmen last Monday and went to the printer on Wednesday, March 6. The full warrant is now available on the Harvard town website.
Approving the warrant required the Selectmen to gather on Thursday morning, Feb. 28, in a continuation of their marathon three-and-a-half-hour session on Tuesday, Feb. 26. The Tuesday evening meeting had ground to a halt after prolonged debate over Article 10, a proposal submitted by the Planning Board to “establish the position of Town Planner in Fiscal Year 2014.”
By Thursday, however, debate over whether to include Article 10 was irrelevant, as a second article—identical in wording to the first—had been submitted by a citizens’ petition with about 20 signatures. The Selectmen are bound by law to include any article that receives 10 or more signatures in the warrant for Annual Town Meeting.
A back-up strategy
Among the signatories for the new article, number 43 in the final version of the warrant, were Selectmen Ron Ricci and Bill Johnson. Asked why he had supported a second, identical article, Johnson described it as “a back-up strategy to make sure that the article was on the warrant.”
Referring to the Tuesday night debate, Johnson said, “Three of the Selectmen were very unsupportive of that article, and despite requests to put aside their personal opinions…they kept protesting and protesting.”
Johnson emphasized that his main concern was that voters have a chance to express their will on the issue, rather than having it decided by the Selectmen alone. However, on a similarly controversial article for last year’s warrant about remodeling the Town Hall, both Johnson and Ricci voted against putting the matter before the voters.
Johnson said that the petition for the new article was signed and submitted on Wednesday, Feb. 27, between the time that the Selectmen’s meeting was continued on Tuesday night and when it resumed Thursday morning.
Two bites of the apple
Town Moderator Bob Eubank said he did not know of any previous occasion when there had been two identical articles on the Town Meeting warrant.
Asked whether Articles 10 and 43 would be merged at Town Meeting, Town Administrator Tim Bragan said they would be voted on separately. He said that if voters approved Article 10, okaying the town planner position, then Article 43 would probably be passed over. But if Article 10 was defeated, he said, Article 43 would be voted on in its turn, near the end of the meeting. Asked if that meant that proponents of the town planner position were, in effect, getting two bites of the apple, Bragan said yes.
Selectman Johnson also said he expected the articles to be considered in numerical order. Selectman Ricci, however, said he thought the moderator could take some procedural step to consider the two articles as one.
Looking back to 2007, Selectwoman Marie Sobalvarro recalled an occasion where two pairs of articles dealing with a single issue appeared on the warrant. Again in that case, one article had been placed on the warrant by the Selectmen, the other by citizens’ petition. One pair concerned a Special-Education audit, the second Finance Committee selection. She said that then-Moderator Dave Westerling used a “group simultaneously, address once, withdraw the second article” approach in those cases.
The Selectmen moved much more quickly through the remaining articles on Thursday. Although they agreed on the gist of the articles, they left the exact wording for several articles uncertain, pending the approval of Town Counsel Mark Lanza. The Selectmen gave Lanza time to read over the warrant, and then they each went to Town Hall and signed the warrant individually on Monday, March 4.
