Williamstown Select Board Discusses Ideas to Alter Town Meeting
WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass. — The Select Board on Monday discussed some of the changes it might consider making to the annual town meeting and called on residents to provide their comments about any and all modifications being considered.
After a 4 1/2-hour meeting in June at Mount Greylock Regional School, the board made it a priority to look at ideas that might make the meeting more efficient, assigning members Randy Fippinger and Jane Patton to work with Town Moderator Elisabeth Goodman to study the issue.
On Monday, Fippinger went through a series of 12 suggestions designed to make the meeting more intended to either make the meeting more accessible to a wider range of residents or more efficient in its operations or both.
From an accessibility standpoint, the working group suggested small changes like printing the warrant in Spanish to accommodate residents for whom it is their first language and big changes like considering moving the meeting to a weekend afternoon or scheduling multiple meetings each spring.
In terms of efficiency, the working group suggested a pre-town meeting session at which residents can become educated on the issues on the warrant and ask questions about them, and introducing clickers that would record attendees' votes electronically on the warrant articles.
The biggest potential change of all, moving from an open town meeting to a representative town meeting, was one that neither the working group nor the Select Board members had any interest in pursuing.
Fippinger included it on the list as a change the board could consider implementing and acknowledged the argument that elected representatives might come to the meeting more prepared to discuss and decide on issues. But no one expressed any support for the idea, and several Select Board members said they had heard no support for that change among their constituents.
On the other hand, several of the Select Board members indicated that they were intrigued by the idea of scheduling multiple town meeting dates or at least scheduling a continuation date if the meeting reaches a predetermined time limit.
At June's meeting and in the weeks following, some residents complained that contentious zoning bylaw amendments on the warrant came up long after the 7 p.m. start. Some blamed a sense of fatigue on the part of attendees for the meeting's decision to refer those zoning questions back to the Planning Board.
"If it's a busy docket, having more than one meeting helps," Andy Hogeland said on Monday. "It shouldn't last for more than four hours. If there's a lot going on, it could be more than one night."
The pre-town meeting informational meeting, which could be held in-person or over Zoom, could potentially address both the attendance and efficiency issues. A better informed voting public might be more willing to participate in the meeting, and if questions about the articles are answered in advance, they would not need to be raised on the floor.
Likewise, the "clicker" proposal could address both issues, the working group said.
By allowing votes to be tallied electronically, the meeting could avoid sometimes lengthy counts in narrowly decided "standing votes." And, advocates say, the use of clickers could make the meeting more welcoming to residents who don't feel comfortable casting their vote on hotly debated issues without the cloak of anonymity.
Fippinger said there are pros and cons on the latter point.
"Some people culturally, in this town, think it's important for people to express publicly how they vote," he said. "Some have said they feel intimidated."
The clicker question drew the most back-and-forth among attendees at Monday's meeting.
Both Hogeland and Hugh Daley said they were attracted to the electronic voting.
Daley noted that fiscal items – the bulk of most town meetings – are decided on voice votes, and while there always are a handful of naysayers it is difficult to know how many people say nothing in a room where the overwhelming number of votes are affirmative.
"I would like us, as a community, to start getting a sense of the 3 percent, 5 percent, 10 percent who are getting worried about the budget," Daley said. "What the clicker allows us to do is to quantify that concern. With the clicker, you find out what the minority vote is."
Stephanie Boyd of the Planning Board said she thought the town could lose something if it did away with the current system of standing and raising a card to vote on issues too close to decide by voice vote.
"One of my thoughts is as a volunteer government, we have to to stand up and say what we think," Boyd said. "I feel it's such a community process of learning how to discuss issues that we don't all agree on and then being able to walk out the door as a community. I think we lose some of that with the clickers."
The clickers would be the priciest change on the list being considered.
Fippinger said the town had an old quote of $27,000 to purchase 1,000 of the units, although only once in the last 16 years has attendance at town meeting surpassed 500, and the average in that period was 341.
And there are potential cost savings from the clickers after the upfront investment. Fippinger said the town clerk noted that the town would need to hire fewer workers to tally the standing votes at the meeting.
Nothing was decided on any of the proposed modifications on Monday night. Hogeland suggested that if the committee looking at possible charter revisions does a townwide survey as it has discussed, the Select Board could add to the survey questions about possible changes to the town meeting.
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