The Select Board, in our opinion, is right to consider a return to a one-session Annual Town Meeting in the spring. Splitting the meeting into two sessions may have allowed more time for discussion of a complex bylaw such as the one to regulate private water use that narrowly passed Saturday, but it hasn’t increased turnout. And it’s hard to argue that citizens were better prepared when two of the articles on this fall’s warrant were last-minute additions, accepted by the Select Board without hearings or adequate public communication by the boards that proposed them. Many attendees likely saw them for the first time Saturday.
The Harvard Charter requires a quorum of 50 voters for a Town Meeting to proceed. But once total attendance dips to two or three times that number, Town Meeting decisions become vulnerable to organized factions able to push a controversial proposal past the majority or two-thirds vote required for its passage. And clearly timing remains an issue, with many unable to attend due to lack of babysitting or commitments to competing activities—including three of the town’s five Select Board members.
Perhaps the articles passed Saturday would have passed if 500 citizens had been present, but we’ll never know. What we can say is that 160 of 4,578 Harvard voters chose to add a full-time employee to Town Hall staff, empower the town to regulate private water use, and place Bromfield House in the historic district.
Attendance at both the spring and fall sessions over the past four years has averaged 270 with a high of 410 in the fall of 2021 and a low of 108 the prior October, according to numbers presented by Town Administrator Tim Bragan at Tuesday night’s Select Board Meeting. If citizens value the direct democracy that Harvard’s town meeting government provides, it’s time to seriously consider how to make it work for more of its citizens. A return to a single session may not be the answer. Low Town Meeting attendance is not unique to Harvard and other factors are undoubtedly at work, but ad hoc experiments like the move to two sessions haven’t cut it.
