Select Board Seeks to Remove Safety Valve

From the looks of the Town Meeting warrant, the Select Board seeks to make some major changes to the freedoms currently afforded to the public:

Article 6: Change the date of the Annual Town Meeting to an unspecified date to be set by the Select Board.

Article 7: REMOVE the ENTIRE Referendum Procedure from the Town Charter.

The Referendum is a little-used procedure. It is a safeguard. It states, in part: "No final vote of a town meeting on any warrant article, except:(...); shall take effect until after five days from the dissolution of the town meeting. If a petition seeking a referendum vote on any article is not filed with the select board within the said five days, the votes of the town meeting shall then take effect."

What does it mean? If Town Meeting voted to institute Stupid Bylaw X, then 3% of the voters could petition to have that decision placed on an election ballot. Then, if voters who voted at an election decide to scrap Stupid Bylaw X, they can. If they want to keep it, they can.

Without that referendum procedure however, the Select Board removes a valuable and much requested check & balance. As Clerk of the Charter Commission, I kept detailed notes on our deliberations. Among them include the following.

"Charter Commissioners noted that the number [of Petitioners required to start the Referendum] needs to be high enough to prevent abuse, yet low enough as to be attainable should Town Meeting vastly underestimate the will of the non-attending public" (10-29-03)

Two members "expressed concern that the town voters might use the opportunity to reconsider Town Meeting decisions at the ballot box too frequently." (3-9-04; see also 12-17-03). Clearly that has not happened.

Others called it a "safety valve" (10-29-03, 11-5-03, 12-17-03 )

"Reasons for including the referendum in the charter: no one at the hearings indicated that they disliked this procedure; they were asking questions to clarify it because it is something new. Since Massachusetts General Law requires Special Town Meetings be held if only 200 voters petition for one, the town needs a different safety valve that allows for more people to vote, even with absentee ballots. Special Town Meetings do not allow for absentee ballots. The Referendum procedure is in place to “compete” with, or serve as an alternative to, Special Town Meetings. If the town tried to live with this provision for a few years and decided that it doesn’t work as anticipated, the town could remove this provision" (12-17-03, emphasis mine).

How common are referendum procedures elsewhere? "Marilyn Contreas (Senior Policy Analyst for the Dept. of Housing and Community Development) ...said that they are very prevalent." (11-12-03, emphasis mine)

"It is the ultimate check on a town meeting run amok" (7-23-03, emphasis mine).

SO WHY does the Select Board want to REMOVE this important right of the people?

According to the warrant, "By deleting this section, the Town gains more time for budget deliberations and to enable the annual election to be conducted before the end of the school year."

This is NOT a good reason, since nothing in the referendum procedure prohibits the election from happening before the end of the school year. Referendum elections may be held as special elections or as part of a general election. No law requires them to be held with a general election. Town leaders have connected the one time a referendum was used with a general election, but that was a choice, not a requirement. The Select Board's reasoning attacks a problem with the wrong weapon.

The Charter Commission set the date of Town Meeting for "the last Tuesday in April"....Perhaps the Select Board would like to have Elections come AFTER Town Meeting, so they cannot be held accountable by the voters for their actions/inactions at Town Meeting?

Who knows....what does matter however, is that the Select Board would like to take away a hard-won right of the people to protest stupid decisions that do not represent the voters.

In addition to Articles 6 and 7, Article 8 also aims to gut the Charter's protections for access to information. By cutting in half the time requirements for descriptions of items on the warrant, the Select Board shortens the public's time to review the items they will vote on.

What to do? Well, voting NO on these articles SAVES our freedoms.






Respectfully submitted,
Rebecca M. Townsend

Looking for a Choice at Town Meeting?

Longmeadow News- May 14, 2009
[click image to read entire article]

In the May 14, 2009 issue of the Longmeadow News, Mr. Alex Grant wrote in an opinion piece that the voters of Longmeadow were “missing … a choice” in the budget. Mr. Grant wrote that Longmeadow residents “have little choice but to approve the budget presented to them.”

Although Mr. Grant’s observation is correct that the town residents were given but one budget option to either approve or disapprove, I submit that the floor of the town meeting is not the place to write a $52 million budget. What is missing from Mr. Grant’s essay is the fact that the School Committee, the Select Board, and the Finance Committee jointly developed the proposed budget over a period of nearly six months – during which time there were numerous opportunities for public input. By the time of the Town Meeting, residents should expect the budget to be finalized and presented for approval by the residents of the town.

The complexity of the budget, and the requirement that it be balanced, is such that its development by 11,000 town voters, or even 150 town meeting attendees is not practical. The budget is appropriately, in my opinion, prepared by the three committees that are charged with representing the town residents. The members of these committees take into account the needs of the town as well as input from residents. They assure that legal constraints (mandated programs) are financed, and that other statutory requirements are met (such as having a balance between income and expenses).

Once the proposed budget is developed and finalized, what the Town Meeting should do is provide a forum for:

• Those developing the budget to explain what they did and how they made the choices that were made. Options that were considered and rejected could be presented, but a review of six months of budget development would are not needed. Nothing would be served by rehashing at the town meeting each controversy or compromise that took place during the preparation of the budget. The Town Manager’s presentation met these objectives.
  
• Individuals to ask questions regarding the budget process, the bases for decisions that were made, and the budget recommendations.
  
• Individuals and groups with alternate positions on budget items (income or expenditures) to communicate their position and seek support from the town voters acting as the legislative branch of our government. Alternative proposals for additional spending should include either equivalent spending reductions in other line items or a source of income to support the added line expense.

Even with the prior development of the budget, residents still have the option of rejecting the budget on the floor of the town meeting – although I would submit that such action should be accompanied by a clear directive of how the proposed budget should be revised.

Mr. Grant acknowledged that the operating budget presented at this year’s Town Meeting “looked like a reasonable product of tough times and hard choice”. However, I could not disagree more strongly to his other comment that “the 150 residents who attended should be under no illusion that they wielded any significant power at that meeting.” Those 150 people did far more than pass a budget that that had been written, debated, and rewritten over a period of six months; they acted on 33 other articles on the Warrant, several of which had not been subject to that same level of public review over the prior several months. It is most interesting to note, that indeed, many of the articles and motions that failed to gain residents’ support at the town meeting were those that had not been broadly considered prior to the meeting.

The issue that appeared to be of greatest interest to Mr. Grant (and perhaps to those who were in attendance) was the issue of postponing the vote on the budget. Although the tri-committees (School, Select Board, Finance) had met the evening before the town meeting to discuss this issue, the short notice prior to that meeting and technical difficulties at LCTV (which prevented it from being televised) essentially made this a “new” issue to most of the electorate when it was proposed on the floor of the meeting. As a new issue, the debate was lively and polarized. I would guess that opinions were voiced at the Town Meeting that had not been heard the evening before. With the State Aid budget still not in place two weeks after the town meeting, it appears that the decision reached by the town’s electorate prevented an unnecessary delay in the approval of the budget that was developed over months of effort.

Other articles that seemed perfunctory when posted (such as articles 13 for remote reading water meters, articles 16 and 18 on parking and snow removal and article 32 on outdoor water use) also failed when questions arose on the floor of the town meeting that might have been addressed or at least anticipated had these items been given the same opportunity for prior public review.

Contrast these articles that did not pass with the passage of articles that included the approval of large expenditures. No, Mr. Grant, the passage of these articles was not a “foregone conclusion”, but their passage was rather an indication that the appropriate amount of planning and review had been completed prior to the evening of the meeting. In addition to the budget, the capital expenditures and the Community Preservation expenditures had been the subject of multiple publically held committee hearings over many months. Input from individuals and groups potentially affected by these warrant articles had been considered prior to the votes at the town meeting

Yes, Mr. Grant, only 150 people participated in this year’s town meeting, but whether in the vote on postponement of the budget or any of the 34 scheduled Warrant Articles, these people had significant power – and hopefully next year will see ten times as many voters at the Longmeadow Town Meeting to show the power of the people.

Mark P. Gold

Mark Gold is the chairman of the Capital Planning Committee and is a candidate for the one year seat on the Select Board. See his website at GoldforSelectBoard.com for additional information.

SC Candidates Answer Some Tough Questions

As it has been highlighted on this blog in the recent past, the Town of Longmeadow and its citizens are facing a financial crisis over the next few years. With the rapidly escalating costs of education (+ other town services) and slow growth sources of revenue, our town will be forced to make some tough decisions about how to spend our money. In past years Town taxpayers have already shown their displeasure with Proposition 2½ overrides and last year a $2.1 million override was passed by the slimmest margin (6 votes).

In the upcoming Annual Town Elections on June 10 there are six candidates running for three open seats on the Longmeadow School Committee. The three people that will be chosen will be have a significant role in deciding the future course of education in our town.

There is a Meet the SC Candidates forum posted on LongmeadowBiz which provides candidate profile information. In addition, there is a series of four questions which have been asked of each candidate.

1. In your view what are the most pressing needs facing our schools?
2. How should the schools best handle the rising costs of special education?
3. How do you feel about the need for a new high school?
4. What would do to improve the communication between the School Committee and town government? Between town residents and the School Committee?

Take the time to read each candidate’s profile and their answers and make sure that you stop by the Longmeadow Community House on June 10 between 8 am – 8 pm to VOTE for your favorite candidate! Your vote counts…. remember last year’s Proposition 2½ question passed by only 6 votes.

If you are out of town on June 10 and cannot vote…. That is no excuse. Stop the Town Hall before June 9, 12 noon and pick up an ABSENTEE ballot.

Let’s get a 50% turnout for this important election.