If you were offered a seat in a legislature, with the power to propose or amend the laws you live under every day, would you take it? Well, you do have that chance—this weekend at Annual Town Meeting, April 1, 9 a.m. in the Bromfield School gymnasium.
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The Annual Town Meeting is Harvard’s annual legislative session. Sign in, and you suddenly acquire the powers and responsibilities of a representative of your town. You may speak for or against any article, offer amendments, and cast your vote, along with the other 200 to 300 of the town’s roughly 4,370 registered voters. Results vary, but as the graph at the right shows, Annual Town Meeting turnout has hovered between 7 and 8 percent of registered voters for the past several years.
The town meeting form of government has been described as the world’s purest form of democracy. But in Harvard it’s always been more than that, full of local color and as representative of the town’s diverse interests as the May Apple Blossom Festival, or the fall League of Women Voters and Harvard Schools Trust Flea Market. For newcomers and veterans alike, here’s a short list of things to look for and do:
Baby-sitting
If you’ve signed up online for child care during the meeting, you can drop off your children at the Hildreth Elementary School back door by the kindergarten wing. Child care is available for kids 1 year and older at no cost from 8:30 a.m. until 12:30 p.m., courtesy of Harvard Girl Scout Troop 30741 and three adult leaders. (Donations are appreciated to support a weekend zip line excursion for the Scouts.) Kids will be in the Bridges room, #151, which is the room closest to the back door. There was not enough demand for baby-sitting after the lunch break, so none has been scheduled.
Arrange for a ride
If you need a ride to the meeting, call the Council on Aging at 978-456-4120 by 1 p.m. Friday. COA Director Debbie Thompson says the van will pick up riders around 8:30 a.m. And if you plan on driving to the meeting, remember that parking at Bromfield is always at a premium, so ride sharing is encouraged.
Collect your meeting supplies
Grab your copy of the Town Meeting booklet, which you should have received by now in the mail. (It’s the booklet with the black-and-white photo of the waterfall by Heidi Frank and Justin Patenaude on the cover.) In addition to its detailed reports on town finances, the booklet contains a copy of every article up for consideration, a handy glossary of Town Meeting terms, and a two-page guide to Town Meeting rules of order by the League of Women Voters. Extra copies of the warrant will be available at the gym, but why waste paper?
Don’t forget to bring this issue of the Press as well, which contains our “Warrant in Plain English” for those who don’t want to wade through the legalese, as well as deeper looks at some of the warrant’s more expensive or controversial proposals.
Are you a knitter? Many attendees are. If so, bring your yarn and needles. Knitters can hope for fewer dropped stitches this year in the gym than when the meeting was held in the dimly lit Cronin Auditorium. If you’re not a knitter, read more about this Harvard tradition in our feature “Knit One, Vote One.”
Attend a board meeting
Seriously. Get to the gym a little early (8:15 a.m.) and you may well see the selectmen, the Finance Committee, the capital committee, or other boards gathering to hash out the final wording of articles. Such meetings are open to the public. If you wonder what they might be up to, just stop by.
Sign in early
Even if you skip the last-minute scrum of town boards, you’ll want to arrive early and sign in before you do anything else. To participate you must be a registered voter. As you enter the gym, you’ll be asked to confirm your status with a “checker,” and you’ll be handed a colored card, which you’ll raise each time the moderator calls for a vote. As 9 a.m. approaches, there’s often a crush at the door, and you may find yourself waiting in line as the meeting gets underway.
Moderator Bob Eubank, who chairs Town Meeting, suggests that if you plan to speak on any of the articles, you should consider claiming an aisle seat for easier access to a microphone.
Grab coffee and a pastry
The General Store will be serving coffee all day in the Bromfield cafeteria starting at 8:30 a.m. Pastries will be available in the morning (see the menu that accompanies this story). Stop by and fuel up for the morning. It’s cash only.
Look for civic groups in hallway
The hallway to the meeting room has traditionally been filled with booths and easels set up by various groups. With luck, some will be selling coffee and home-baked goodies to raise money for their causes and events. Among others, the spring cleanup crew will be there, giving volunteers a chance to sign up and clear their favorite road of litter and invasive garlic mustard plants. Arm in Arm, a new group committed to making Harvard a more welcoming town, will be selling baked goods. The League of Women Voters plans to have a table, and the Board of Health will be handing out tick pullers and advice for owners of septic systems. Space is available to additional groups on a first-come, first-served basis.
Pick up the 2016 Annual Town Report
Once you’ve checked in with the Town Meeting registrars, look for copies of the 2016 Town Report for all you ever wanted to know about your town. The Town Report includes updates from virtually every board and department in Harvard. Pick any town organization, and you’ll find its latest stats and accomplishments enumerated here. Look for other handouts, such as last-minute changes to the wording of articles.
Every year, the selectmen name a citizen of Harvard whose contributions to the town are worthy of special recognition. The name is kept secret until the day of Town Meeting. At some point during the morning, the moderator will pause to announce the name of this year’s choice and invite the individual to step forward, along with family members. For a sneak peek, flip open the cover of the Town Report and you’ll know who it is.
Take a seat and legislate
“I love thinking of the Town Meeting as a legislature, with everyone as a representative of the town,” Town Moderator Bob Eubank said in a phone interview last year. Eubank, who has served as moderator for a decade, is known for reminding people at the beginning of Town Meeting, “Remember, at the end of the day, we are all still neighbors.”
“We really have a terrific town, and people are very respectful of the process,” Eubank said. “Everyone is civil.”
In some ways the process itself, whose rules can be found in the Town Meeting booklet, helps to keep that level of civility (see “Town Meeting Procedures” on page 26). People stand in line, sometimes for quite a while, waiting for a turn to speak. A person may offer an amendment to an article, and the board that proposed the article considers the change. If the board decides it is a “friendly” (acceptable) amendment, the change is made. Or if the board does not accept the change, then the amendment goes to a vote.
Process also keeps the meeting on track and on topic. Changes or amendments have to be “within the scope of the article.” As Eubank put it, they have to be “within the initial goal or intent of what the article was meant to address.” The moderator can rule out changes that add vague or unrelated material to an article. No one, for example, would be allowed to add a rule to regulate chicken coops to the town’s omnibus budget, unlike Congress, which sometimes adds riders to otherwise unrelated laws.
“The moderator is remarkably empowered to say no to things,” Eubank acknowledged, but he added that he has never had to use that power to stop a meeting from veering out of control. “I’ve never encountered disorder.”
Have lunch with someone you don’t know
Town Meeting typically takes a break around noontime, and this year attendees can head to the Bromfield cafeteria to dine on sandwiches, soup, a “protein box,” and beverages from the General Store. See the menu that accompanies this article. It’s an opportunity to spend some time with an elected official or perhaps someone from town you don’t know. Sales are cash only.
Stick around to vote on Article 50
Just because lunch is over doesn’t mean Town Meeting has adjourned. Yes, Article 50, the last one on the agenda, may not be taken up until late afternoon. But shortly before Article 50 are several bylaw changes, a citizen petition, a discussion on Devens, and a vote on a municipal internet service provider, among other matters that deserve Town Meeting attention.
