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Involving the Public for Hundreds of Years
New England Town Meetings

by Mark Kemp-Rye
On Tap Managing Editor

Actively soliciting local involvement in government may be a new concept to some communities, but to folks in the Northeast, it’s old hat. They’ve been involved in public participation—in the form of the New England town meeting—for more than 300 years. And if you thought the town meeting was little more than a quaint practice, now relegated to the history books, you’d be mistaken. This distinctive form of local government is alive and well throughout the region.

“Yes, we still have town meetings in Vermont on the first Tuesday of March,” says Jay Rutherford, director of the state’s Water Supply Division. “In my town, it’s held in the local elementary school and the ladies auxiliary puts on lunch in the school cafeteria. Major money issues are still decided at the meetings. Water and wastewater infrastructure projects, and rate increases are decided by a ballot vote. “Of course, it’s during the day, and many citizens either have to work, or have to take time off, so participation is limited,” he continues. “The old days of the farmer taking the day off to travel to town for the meeting are long gone, for the most part.”

A Brief History of the Town Meeting
The New England town meeting, where citizens gather to discuss local issues and vote on them, is an outgrowth of church meetings and dates back to the 17th century. Initially, only “men of property” could participate. Today, all registered voters may take part in the meeting. New England comprises Vermont, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, Connecticut, Massachusetts, and Maine.

“A New England town meeting, except in Rhode Island, is called by the Board of Selectmen—the town’s plural executive—which issues a warrant or warning of the place, date, and time of the meeting. The warrant also contains business articles, a fixed agenda to be acted upon by the assembled voters. Should the selectpersons fail to include in the warrant an article requested by a group of voters, the latter may employ the initiative to place the article in the warrant,” reports the New Rules Project (NRP) on their Web site.
According to NRP, “Proponents of the town assembly emphasize that it is the purest form of democracy that ensures that all policy decisions are in the public interest since no intermediaries are placed between the voters and the public decisions.”

Critics maintain that, unless participation is high, it isn’t the purest form of democracy. They point to both low voter turnout and that some meetings have been dominated by special interest groups. James Madison, an early critic of town meetings, wrote in 1788’s The Federalist Number 55, “In all very numerous assemblies, of whatever characters composed, passion never fails to wrest the scepter from reason. Had every Athenian citizen been a Socrates, every Athenian assembly would still have been a mob.”

Over the years, towns have developed different methods to address these concerns. By the late 19th century, for example, many towns established a finance committee to advise town meetings. Some towns only hold meetings to appropriate funds, while others now elect “town meeting members” to decide issues.

State Police Called to Town Meeting
The mob scene Madison feared actually occurred in the small town of Cabot, Vermont, home of the world-famous Cabot Cheese. A November 1997 meeting about a bond article became so heated that the State Police had to be summoned to keep the peace. “It was the wildest thing I’ve seen in 24 years in the business,” says Bob Dufresne, president of Dufresne and Associates, the Vermont engineering firm that worked on the final project. As far back as 1968, the State of Vermont had documented pollution of the Upper Branch of the Winooski River, primarily from residences in the Village of Cabot. The community gets its source water from two wells north of the river.

Over the years, residents opposed several efforts to fund a wastewater treatment facility. “During the 1970s and 80s, while other communities were taking advantage of 90 percent grants-in-aid to solve their pollution problems, Cabot voters would not pass a bond,” recalls Dufresne. Some members of the opposition eventually agreed to serve on an advisory committee and came up with a plan for a recirculating sand filter system. The total project cost was estimated at $2.3 million and voters passed a $588,500 local bond in 1997 to start construction of the facility.

“What the voters didn’t know was that the filter wouldn’t fit on the only site available,” says Dufresne. “In fact, as proposed, the site would’ve been the size of seven tennis courts. Plus, four out of the five project engineers were leaving the design firm (the original company), the proposed phosphorous removal system wouldn’t work, and the costs would more than double.” When residents learned about this at an informational meeting, they were, understandably, upset. So upset, in fact, that the police were called.

Rocky Start, Happy Ending
Town officials knew that they had to come up with a solution and fast. They suspected that another bond issue would go down in defeat and asked Dufresne and his company to find a workable solution to the problem. A new membrane process that had been successful in Canada, seemed like a potential solution, but there were no municipal applications yet in the U.S. After an investigative trip to Canada and meetings to convince state and federal officials that the new technology should be approved, design was initiated.
The membrane process was finished in 2001. It ended up using less than 10 percent of the land and cost $812,000 less than the originally planned recirculating filter. According to Dufresne, in addition to the reduced land and cost benefit, the higher level of water quality produced was significant. “The wastewater effluent produced from the membranes is similar to drinking water without the chlorine,” he says.

Fortunately, the Cabot story has a happy ending. Thirty-three years after the state first recommended eliminating the contamination, the direct discharge of raw sewage into the upper Winooski River stopped.
For more information about New England town meetings, visit the New Rules Project Web site at www.newrules.org/gov/ mtg.html. Dufresne and Associates maintains a Web site at www.dufresneassociates.com.