Just making it through the act of voting support for and choosing who would read each of the 44 articles of the Annual Town Meeting warrant made Select Board members groan at their April 15 meeting. Faced with the reality that Town Meeting attendees will likely pack up and go home as the hour gets late and Planning Board members are deep into explaining complex ideas such as overlay districts and form-based code, the board came up with a contingency plan.
The meeting starts at noon Saturday, May 3, and Chair SusanMary Redinger said attendees “will start to lose it” around 5:30 p.m, probably no later than 6. She said Cronin Auditorium is booked Sunday, and Monday would be “an awful choice.”
Redinger suggested that the 11 zoning articles should be prioritized, and those at the top of the list could be discussed and voted on first. If the meeting is running long, the moderator could move to take no action on the remaining zoning articles and the board could call a Special Town Meeting sometime this year to vote on those.
Town Administrator Dan Nason reminded the board that if the zoning articles are “passed over,” that’s considered a negative vote, and it would mean those articles could not be brought back before Town Meeting for two years. Select Board member Kara Minar said the Planning Board could instead “withdraw them without prejudice,” and that would eliminate the two-year restriction.
Nason suggested that, if needed, a Special Town Meeting could be called a few weeks after the May meeting. But Minar said a second meeting held soon after Annual Town Meeting might only attract voters that wanted to vote against one or more of the remaining articles.
In 2019, the board added a second session of Annual Town Meeting in the fall specifically to discuss zoning articles, which are typically lengthy and sometimes confusing. Those articles were getting short shrift at the end of the spring warrant when meeting-goers were tired. The board reversed that decision last fall, at Nason’s recommendation, to save money and the extra effort involved in holding a second Town Meeting. The vote to return to a single Town Meeting was 3-2, with Minar and Select Board member Charles Oliver voting against it, saying it would once again cause zoning articles to be shortchanged. “We made the change for a reason,” Oliver told the board before the vote.
Nason said the articles that should be voted on at the upcoming Town Meeting are those regarding revisions to the town’s floodplain district, loosening regulations on where accessory dwelling units can be built, and revisions to permitted uses in the commercial district.
Redinger also mentioned two articles she thought should be voted on in May—one to amend the erosion control bylaw and one to adopt a demolition delay bylaw, requested by the Historical Commission. That would leave the hefty form-based code and town center overlay district articles for the fall. Redinger said she thought those two articles alone could take an hour.
The Select Board’s current plan is to prioritize the zoning articles and to caucus with the moderator and the Planning Board around 4:30 p.m. during Annual Town Meeting to discuss the need to hold any articles for a future Special Town Meeting, which would likely be held in the fall.
When the board was voting on its recommendations, the only article in the warrant that was called out for discussion was Article 14, which asks the town to establish and fund a pension stabilization fund. The amount requested to fund the account is $200,000, which requires a separate override vote at the polls. Chair Redinger said she didn’t think it was fair to ask people to take on more debt right now. Board member Minar agreed and asked if the article could be changed to establish the fund but not put any money into it. Nason said it would be easier to have someone on the Town Meeting floor make that motion. The board voted 3-1 to recommend the article, with Redinger voting nay.
