Sunday, February 25, 2007
TOWN MEETINGS
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In a few weeks, Hugh Dwelley will drive from his winter home in Fairfax, Va., to catch a flight bound for Maine.
The annual pilgrimage usually starts in the early morning.
Dwelley will take a connecting flight to Bar Harbor. Then he'll ride the ferry along with the daily mail, cutting through waves, wind and chunks of ice to Little Cranberry Island. It's his summer home, the place where he grew up and where his great grandmother's house still stands.
But in March, Dwelley does not come for an extended stay. He makes this trip for one purpose: town meeting.
"I'm interested in town affairs and what is going on, in having a say," said Dwelley, a retired foreign service officer. For the five islands that make up the town of the Cranberry Isles, town meeting this year starts at 9 a.m. on Monday, March 12.
"It's a community gathering after a long winter," Dwelley said. "I think it is a very effective way to govern."
History and common wisdom seem to be on his side.
Town meeting -- the traditional New England assembly of residents to debate, amend and, ideally, approve a budget and ordinances -- has been the pre-eminent form of local government since long before Maine broke away from Massachusetts in 1820. About 440 of the 496 municipalities in the state still meet in March or June, with a few scattered exceptions in between, to put town affairs in order.
It also remains very much a social event, a chance to catch up with neighbors and share baked bean dinners cooked by the Lions Club or the Veterans of Foreign Wars.
Societal changes, though, continue to chip away at town meeting.
Attendance has slipped in some areas to a handful of residents, and several towns have dropped the traditional meeting in favor of a simple up or down vote on the budget. At least 16 towns, including 12 in the past three years, have switched. Officials in those towns say more voters turn out for a referendum than for a meeting that can last hours.
"Certainly, citizen participation has declined," said Joseph Zimmerman, a professor and New Hampshire native who wrote a book about New England town meetings. "There are so many diversions today, which you didn't have in the old days.
"In the old days," Zimmerman said, "the town meeting was the diversion."
He expects the same question to keep coming up every year at this time, as town meeting season commences: Will the meetings endure for another couple hundred years, or will more towns opt to leave it like they left the one-room schoolhouse -- as a fond memory?
"It is a traditional institution. They die a slow death, if they die at all," Zimmerman said. "They may be getting a little bit weaker, but they are continuing in many places."
Count the town of Raymond, in northern Cumberland County, among those places where town meeting has kept a firm hold.
About 200 or 300 voters generally attend. While that number is roughly 7 percent of the total number of registered voters, it represents a healthy cross-section of the community, said Town Manager Don Willard. There is lively debate, he said, and Willard has not heard complaints that the system is not working.
"I would say they are very happy with the way things are; they don't want to change," Willard said. "This is the purest form of democracy. It is the one level of government that you can truly reach out and touch."
That is not to say that officials in Raymond, population 4,500, are ignoring the changes going on around them. They have made information and services available on the town Web site, and distribute information every month in a newsletter called the Raymond Roadrunner.
The town also has a new public- access television station, and for the first time, town meeting will be broadcast live this year. Willard and the selectmen spend time breaking the town meeting warrant into understandable chunks.
All of those efforts, Willard said, help keep the interest in town meeting. He has been pleased by the number of new residents, not just old-timers, showing up every year.
"How you package the town meeting makes a big difference," Willard said.
Mike Starn of the Maine Municipal Association supports that kind of work. The MMA is doing its own outreach program this year, called "Get Involved," urging people to participate in town meeting and local government in general.
"It is extremely important that people not lose something that has been around for 200 years," Starn said.
"Local people feel they have lost power to control what goes on in Washington or Augusta. We are trying to separate ourselves a bit. You can make a difference at the local level."
Starn concedes that the town meeting format does not always fit. When towns grow beyond 10,000 people, they usually adopt a form of government where elected representatives have the final say on the budget. This is usually done with the guidance of a mayor and city manager in the cities, and with a town manager in the towns. Only about 25 communities in Maine, however, have reached that size, Starn said.
"I see the open town meeting continuing to work for the majority of towns," he said.
Starn sees some good points and some drawbacks in the recent trend of towns switching to the referendum system. The best part, he said, is a higher percentage of residents do vote on the budget.
At the last traditional town meeting held in Ogunquit, in 2004, about 135 residents showed up. Later that year voters decided to switch to a referendum vote, and the numbers have increased dramatically.
Last year, 699 of 1,134 registered voters participated, said Town Clerk Judy Shaw-Kagiliery.
"It has been very successful," she said. "There are some people who do miss it, and the socializing. But I have heard more positive than negative."
Starn said the biggest drawback of the trend is that towns lose the honest dialogue of the open meeting. Budget figures can be tinkered with in that format. But if a budget fails at a public referendum, selectmen have to guess on what changes to make, then pay for another referendum vote to try again.
Those are all issues leaders in the town of Gray have wrestled with.
Participation in town meeting last year dropped to about 70 of 5,000 registered voters there, said council Chairman Gary Foster. There also was concern that a small handful of residents could sway decisions in favor of special interests, Foster said. Councilors decided to ask residents if they wanted a change.
"The biggest reason was voter participation," Foster said.
In November, residents voted 2,160 to 996 to decide on the town budget at the polls rather than at town meeting. The town will continue to hold the annual meeting in May, where residents will debate and possibly amend the proposed budget. But the up or down vote will be held at the municipal elections in June.
Other towns that switched to a referendum format, according to Starn, include Boothbay, Mexico, Rumford, Waldoboro, Whitefield, Wiscasset, Dover-Foxcroft, Jefferson, Ogunquit, Windsor, Monmouth, Lebanon, Jay, Bradley and York.
The trend started in Vermont more than 20 years ago, then spread across the border into New Hampshire, said Zimmerman, who teaches at the Rockefeller College of Public Affairs and Policy in New York.
In addition to the argument about lagging attendance, he said, backers of referendums tend to be anti-tax activists.
"They were convinced that a referendum meeting, bigger turnout, would keep taxes lower," Zimmerman said.
Since 1996, 54 of the 221 towns in New Hampshire have switched from the open town meeting to a referendum vote, he said. Voter turnout went up for most of those towns, but it has since dipped back down again, Zimmerman said. Fewer towns are changing systems, and some have voted to go back to the old format, he said.
"It will be interesting to see if the same things happen in Maine," Zimmerman said.
Another factor in the mix, he said, is the influx of newcomers to Maine, from states that have nothing resembling town meeting. Some of them embrace the traditions, Zimmerman said, and others don't.
Norman McKenney said new residents support town meeting in Baldwin, the small town west of Sebago Lake where he has lived all his life.
"People like what they have," said McKenney, who is serving his 35th year on the Board of Selectmen. Turnout at town meeting has hung steady around 100, of about 900 registered voters, McKenney said. Members of the Fire Auxiliary put together a lunch of beans, corn chowder and other staples at the Baldwin Consolidated School.
"We have old Maine people," he said. "We don't like change too much."
Wells, with its growing population of about 10,000, is one town considering a change. Voters will decide in April if they want to create a charter commission, which would consider whether to modify the structure of town government. About 200 residents participated in town meeting last year.
"There have been, periodically, efforts to abolish town meeting," said Joseph Carleton, a former state legislator who has moderated the meeting in Wells since 1983. "There is suspicion that the call for a charter is a disguised attempt to do that."
Carleton favors keeping the open meeting, but making changes that would speed it up and keep voter interest. State law should be changed to allow selectmen to handle routine matters -- like acceptance of roads, or acceptance of charitable donations -- without a public vote on each matter, he said.
"These items make the meeting longer and more boring, and I think it probably results in less people showing up," Carleton said.
As for Dwelley, the retiree who splits time between Maine and Virginia, he hopes the old ways can endure for the future residents of the Cranberry Isles.
"Local control is very important," Dwelley said. "The new people, they have very much embraced the town meeting."
Staff Writer Trevor Maxwell can be contacted at 791-6451 or at:
Questions/Comments
Reader comments
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Hey this can't be right! The crowd against college students voting where they live claimed that retirees who spend the winter in Florida don't vote in Maine. Where's their outrage that THIS part time resident gets to vote, huh?report abuse
I'd like to make a motion that the MaineToday staff integrate an EDIT feature into the damned Reader Comment section. Do I have a second?report abuse
You know that the town meeting system still works when the only people who want to change it are those who LOOSE a warrant article vote...
Town meeting provides an annual, satisfying opportunity to see those members of the community who want to inflict unworkable, radical ideas on the community STEAMROLLED by the overwhelming majority of clear thinking, pragmatic citizens.
"That's right Mr. Smith, we'll send the school children into town on snow days to shovel the sidewalks. Any other comments on the public works budget BEFORE we vote?"
Unfortunately those fringe elements return home frustrated, turn on their computers and come straight to the Reader Comments section of this newspaper...
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