Just curious to see how many other communities are governed by a town meeting format. We have a volunteer, elected Board of Selectmen and a paid Town Clerk whose job it is to actually manage the town's business. We have a volunteer, elected Finance Committee and a paid Treasurer/Tax Collector. A volunteer, elected School Committee and the a paid Superintendent and Assistant Superintendent. The elected boards make recommendations and put items on a warrant that is voted on at an annual town meeting or special town meeting for things that need to be approved outside of the normal cycle.
Town meetings start at 7 PM, can be adjourned after 11 PM and then unvoted articles are carried over to another night until everything is voted on. For any article, anyone in the audience can get up and ask questions or make comments, people can motion for votes to be conducted by secret ballot, motion for votes to be reconsidered (re-voted), motion for articles to be amended or tabled, etc. Some votes are majority and some need 2/3 of the votes. Secret ballots take forever to cast and count. Last night, we voted for 14 of 34 articles, someone called for a secret ballot on the last one so it took over and hour just for that, then we adjourned and get to come back another time and hope to get through the remaining 20 items.
I tend to suck it up and go to most annual town meetings and some special ones out of a sense of civic duty, but I can see how the length and format turn people off and discourage participation. Any whack job with a gripe can get up and bring progress to a screeching halt, and they always show up in full force ready to delay and drag things out. This happens especially on votes for things like school funding, where the obstructionists do their thing in the hopes of parents of young kids giving up and going home. I'm happy to say that at the meeting I was at last night, hundreds of voters hung in there until the very end and the moderator did a good job of minimizing the time suck of the people just talking to hear themselves talk but honestly...it's maddening to sit through.
So...is this how things are governed where you live? If your form of government is different, do you like it? What are the pros and cons of government where you live?
We live in the city, where the board of commissioners, mayor, and a gajillion departments oversee every little thing. So, we elect our officials and then hope they do what they are going to do. City hall meetings are open to the public; often, time is given for public comment, but overall, it's harder to engage in that way directly.
We have a mayor, city council, and planning commission. All these are elected positions (except maybe planning commission - I don't remember my husband running for that office) and are paid a very (I mean very) small stipend for their commitment to our community. All these folks have day jobs. City council meets twice a month - one is open and one is closed. Planning commission meets once a month - closed and one member attends the city council meetings (take turns). The open council meetings can be a real free for all, but usually if there is a hot button topic, we hold special meetings on a different day to address only that topic. We also have "wards" but that only matters at voting time - it dictates where you vote (which is ridiculous in such a small town that you have 4 voting places, but whatever - probably still set up from the horse and buggy days). It is really fun at election time because "running for office" in a small town mostly means hanging out at the post office or local Legion and talking to folks. If you are really fancy, you might put a handmade sign in your yard (that your kids made, of course).
Interesting - it has been a hundred years since I took Civics/Government and I forgot that many places do it differently than we do!
Ours is a miniature version of the US Senate. The township is split into 9 wards. Each ward elects a representative. Motions are made and articles are voted on only by the 9 representatives. People can come to the meetings to participate in the discussions during a designated public comment period (or you can just email your representative) and all votes by the representatives are made public. But in the end, only those 9 people vote, so things move pretty quickly once public discussion is done.
I think you must live in my town! That's exactly the format we have.
The pros are that it's participatory and anyone can speak up on an issue. There is a Board of Selectmen that meets and, of course, people can (and should) speak on particular issues at those meetings, to influence what items get on the Town Meeting agenda (called a Warrant). Still, there is open discussion at the TM. Selectmen's meetings (and most major committee meetings) are televised on the local cable channel so people can watch them if they want and if they are unable to get out.
The cons are that only a small percentage of people actually attend any of the meetings, so decisions are made by a group of regulars. And yes, any whack job can get up and ramble/rant about something. The school budget is a huge chunk of the overall, so there is a bit of a dividing line between long time, retired residents (who either are on fixed incomes or who don't understand or care about the huge increase in, say, special needs curricula/staff) and the parents of the students who want more services and who, in general, are better informed or at lest more invested in the schools. And the senior citizens who are less mobile are unable to get to meetings if they don't drive or if they don't go out at night.
But any issue can be polarizing within the school, so there are often 2 sides among the parents. As you say, having both parents able to vote means hiring a babysitter until 11 PM on Night #1 (tough enough, plus an expense) and then having a sitter on standby in case the meeting resumes the next night. Our TMs usually occur on a Saturday, which one would think offers more flexibility, but even so, it's a 5-6 hour commitment with adjournment and continuation on Monday night. Then there are occasional "special town meetings" to deal with 1-2 specific issues. So what we find is that parents will flood the meeting when there is a school issue on the agenda, and then leave en masse when that vote is done.
We also find that there is very little turn-out for town elections (which are inexplicably held on a day other than Election Day), and most people run unopposed for offices. If we have 2 Selectman seats open, at most we have 3 people running. Most of them are incumbents or people who served in the past - very few new faces. So I think that people are pretty divided among those who participate and the vast majority who do not, either in serving in office or in attending meetings.
Very common set up in New England. The pros are that you don't have to support a lot of salary to get business done. The cons are that some people appointed and elected aren't really good at the job so their ability to understand an issue and resolve it correctly is flawed. In addition since they aren't getting paid to do the job some people have inflated egos (think the board of hoa) and make things difficult.
