by Joan Eliyesil ·
Friday, October 25, 2024
For the past five years, the town has had two sessions of Town Meeting—one in the spring and one in the fall. At the Oct. 15 Select Board meeting, Town Administrator Dan Nason proposed returning to a spring session only, with a Special Town Meeting in the fall if needed.
Nason reasoned that the business conducted in the fall might add an extra couple of hours to the spring meeting, but if the moderator kept things moving, he thought it would be feasible. The single meeting would mean that boards and committees would need to have all warrant articles ready for spring, since there would be no guarantee of a fall meeting.
The Select Board voted in 2019 to split Annual Town Meeting into a spring and fall session as a way to improve attendance. Spring meetings that were held on Saturdays typically started at 9 a.m. and ran far into the afternoon, creating conflicts with sports and other family activities.
In addition, many residents left the long meetings after lunch, leaving fewer people to vote on the articles farther down the warrant, typically those inserted by the Planning Board. The two-session approach was intended to allow for general articles in the spring and planning articles in the fall, when they would get more attention from voters. The spring and fall Annual Town Meetings were supposed to begin in 2020, but due to a parliamentary error in the way the spring meeting was concluded, the fall meeting that year had to be called a Special Town Meeting.
Town Meetings have increasingly drawn a small percentage of registered voters with numbers ranging from 108 to 410 people at any given spring or fall meeting in the past 5 years. (Photo by Lisa Aciukewicz)
Even before the two-session decision in 2019, the town had already been in the habit of having two Town Meetings a year. Over the past 20 years, there have been only a handful of instances where only one Town Meeting was held in a calendar year. The most recent was in 2015, when voters dispensed with 50 articles in a little under five hours. The following year, there were 65 warrant articles spread between Annual Town Meeting in the spring and Special Town Meeting in the fall. Those articles took a total of almost eight hours to discuss.
Town meetings got even longer over each of the next three years; in 2019, it took residents nearly 11 hours to complete spring and fall meetings, two hours longer than the previous year when the new elementary school was on the warrant. Lengthy topics in the spring included funding a new roof for the old library and a study of Ayer Road, banning marijuana retail sales, and adopting a room tax. In the fall, the town spent a total of three hours debating two issues: a ban on deer hunting and changes to zoning in the commercial district.
After the two-session decision, spring meetings got substantially shorter, mainly because, for some reason, there have been fewer warrant articles since 2019. In the years between 2015 and 2019, the average number of spring warrant articles was about 47; in the subsequent five years, it fell to about 26. The average number of articles on fall warrants stayed the same—11.5 in the five years before 2020, and 11.4 in the five years after. That drop in the total number of annual articles has shortened the average total Town Meeting time each year from eight hours prior to 2020 to a little over six hours since then.
There doesn’t seem to be any correlation between the two-session meeting years and attendance numbers. The number of residents checking into Town Meeting still seems to rely largely on the issues to be voted on. The years 2022 and 2023 logged the lowest spring town meeting attendance numbers over the past 10 years, with fewer than 200 residents checking in to each. This year, spring attendance jumped to 392 as the town faced an override to balance the budget.
Arguing against changing the two-session system, Select Board member Charles Oliver pointed out that a lot of things come up after spring Town Meeting that can’t wait a year. He mentioned the re-vote that was needed this fall on the funding for the Devens water connection project. Chair Don Ludwig said that situation was an outlier. But the warrants of the past 10 years show there have been multiple issues that required a vote before the following spring. In the fall of 2019, for instance, the town needed to vote to fund the purchase of the building at 16 Lancaster County Road that is now the Harvard Senior Center. In 2020, a fall vote was needed to balance the budget after an override failed at the polls. In 2023, the town needed to vote on an easement for the Devens water connection project and an emergency generator for the Fire Department to replace one that was no longer operational.
Member Rich Maiore suggested Ludwig poll the other boards, especially the Planning Board, to get its opinion on returning to a single planned Town Meeting per year. Member Kara Minar suggested that the Press also run a survey to get resident input on the issue. That suggestion is under consideration.