by John Osborn ·
Friday, March 21, 2025
It took two sessions of 2024 Annual Town Meeting last year—one in the spring, and another in the fall—to debate and decide 39 articles. But at this year’s Annual Town Meeting, scheduled for Saturday, May 3, voters will be asked to act on 44 items in a single afternoon, the most packed agenda in recent memory.
The monster 80-page 2025 Town Meeting warrant includes not only a $35 million budget, the largest in Harvard’s history, but also two bylaw amendments that Planning Board Chair John McCormack has called “transformative.”
The Select Board approved and then closed the warrant Tuesday night in back-to-back unanimous votes, though not before one member said she was concerned about the inclusion of so many bylaw changes. A warrant serves as an Annual Town Meeting’s agenda and the Select Board has the power to determine what’s included and what’s left out. Town Meeting is the town’s legislature, where any registered voter has the right to speak and vote.
The first 29 articles of this year’s warrant deal with financial matters, including the fiscal 2026 omnibus budget whose expenditures exceed anticipated revenues by $1.37 million. Town Meeting will be asked to approve the budget in its entirety, but voters will later decide at Town Election May 6 how much of it they are willing to pay for. Ballot Questions 1A and 1B will ask voters to increase taxes beyond the annual limit set by Proposition 2½ to pay for either approximately 70% or all of the $1.37 million deficit. If neither question passes, the omnibus budget passed at town meeting will be cut to remain within the 2.5% annual increase in property taxes allowed by state law.
Two financial articles, Articles 14 and 17, may come as a surprise to those who haven’t been following the news. The first establishes a special savings account to help defray the fast-rising cost of pension benefits for town employees. Voters will be asked to approve an additional $200,000 tax override, the proceeds to be deposited into a “pension and other post-employment benefits fund.” Article 17 asks Town Meeting to approve purchase of a 6-acre parcel of land on Old Mill Road for “recreational purposes,” with the money coming from the Capital Stabilization and Investment fund.
Eleven articles propose changes to the town’s bylaws, two of which McCormack and others have described as transformative in their potential to encourage development of town center and the commercial district. They are the town center overlay district bylaw, explored in the March 14 issue of the Press, and a form-based building code meant to help Harvard maintain a “mixed-use village identity” as the Ayer Road commercial district is developed. Also included are a demolition delay bylaw put forward by the Historical Commission and an amendment to the town’s existing Erosion Control bylaw to regulate the cutting of trees.
As in past years, the financial articles come first in the 2025 warrant followed by the proposed bylaw changes. Select Board member Kara Minar reminded her colleagues that in past one-day meetings attendees have drifted away as the afternoon wears on, leaving a bare quorum to decide the fate of new and amended bylaws, typically the last articles to be considered. Rich Maiore, the Select Board’s liaison to the Planning Board, said he had suggested to that board’s members that they hold either the form-based code or town center overlay for consideration at a fall Special Town Meeting, but they had insisted both be considered this spring.
In an email to the Press, Assistant Town Administrator Allyson Mitchell confirmed that Moderator Bill Barton has the power to adjourn a Town Meeting “to the following day, or another agreed upon date.” However, she added, the infrastructure required to run the meeting (sound equipment rentals, tech support), would not necessarily be in place. “We would have to do some organizing ‘on the fly’ to make sure those things were available.”