Town meeting
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Town meeting is a form of local government commonly practiced in the U.S. region of New England, but uncommon elsewhere in the United States. Despite the name "town," it can also apply to other governmental bodies, usually school districts.
While the uses and laws vary from state to state, the general form is for residents of the town or school district to gather once a year and act as a legislative body, voting on operating budgets, laws and other matters for the community's operation over the following 12 months.
Its usage in the English language can also cause confusion. The town meeting is both an event, as in "Freetown had its town meeting last Tuesday" and an entity, as in "Last Tuesday, Town Meeting decided to repave Howland Road." Starting with Jimmy Carter's presidential campaign in 1976, "town meeting" has also been used as a label for any moderated discussion group in which a large audience is invited, as in "John Kerry held a town meeting with voters to discuss issues in the upcoming election." To avoid confusion, this sort of event is often called a "town hall meeting".
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Connecticut
Maine
Massachusetts
The Massachusetts Constitution (in Amendment LXXXIX, which governs the respective powers of municipalities and the state legislature) makes a distinction between a "city form of government" and a "town form of government". In recent years, a number of communities have chosen to adopt a home-rule charter under this Amendment which specifies a city form of government while keeping the style "Town of X", calling their legislative bodies "Town Council", and so on. (The Constitution does not require any specific nomenclature.) Such communities include Methuen, Watertown, Weymouth, and several others. In special legislation, these places are sometimes described as "the city called the Town of X".
The Town Meeting form of government is a mandatory part of being considered a town under state law; cities do not have Town Meeting. However, as noted, the official style of a city or town is defined in its charter, and there is no legal barrier to cities calling themselves "town" or vice versa. As a result, not all of the municipalities that are called towns have Town Meeting. (Only communities with a population of at least 12,000 may adopt a city form of government.)
Common practice distinguishes between a "town meeting" (with an article), which may refer to any such gathering, even if municipal business is not the subject, and "Town Meeting" (never an article), which always refers to the governing body of a town. There are two forms of Town Meeting government:
- Open Town Meeting: Open Town Meetings are required of towns with fewer than 6,000 residents and optional for those with 6,000 or more residents. The Board of Selectmen will call the town meeting by issuing the warrant, which is the list of items--known as articles--to be voted on, with descriptions of each article. The Moderator officiates the meeting by reading each article, explaining it, and making sure the rules of parliamentary procedure are followed. He/she interprets voice votes and counts other votes. The Finance Committee makes recommendations on articles dealing with money, and often drafts the proposed budget. The Town Clerk serves as the clerk of the meeting by recording its results. Town Counsel makes legal recommendations on all articles of the warrant, to ensure town meeting is acting lawfully. All registered voters are free to attend and vote on any and all articles.
- Representative Town Meeting: Towns having at least 6,000 residents may adopt a Representative Town Meeting system through the normal charter-change process. Representative Town Meetings function largely the same as an Open Town Meeting, except that not all registered voters can vote. The townspeople instead elect Town Meeting Members by precinct to represent them and to vote on the issues for them, much like a US Representative votes on behalf of his/her constituents in Congress. Depending on population, a town may have anywhere from 45 to 240 Town Meeting Members. Framingham, the largest town in the state by population, has 216 representatives in Town Meeting, twelve from each ward.
Annual Town Meetings
Annual Town Meetings are held in the spring, and may also be known as the Annual Budget Meeting. They are supposed be held between February 1 and May 31, but may be delayed until June 30. (Town fiscal years start on July 1.) At this meeting, the town takes care of any housecleaning it has left before the end of the current fiscal year, and prepares itself to enter the new fiscal year by approving a budget. It may also vote on non-budgetary issues on the warrant, including the town's general and zoning bylaws.
An article may be placed on the warrant by the Selectmen, sometimes at the request of town departments, or by a petition signed by at least ten registered voters of the town.
Special Town Meetings
Special Town Meetings are held whenever necessary, usually to deal with financial or other pertinent issues that develop between Annual Town Meetings. They function the same as an Annual Town Meeting, only the number of signatures on a petition rises to 200, or 20%, whichever number is lower. While the Selectmen generally call such a meeting, voters may call one through petition. The Selectmen have 45 days from the date of receiving such a petition to hold a Special Town Meeting.
Joint Town Meetings
Joint Town Meetings are an extremely rare form of town meeting. When two or more towns share an operating budget for something, the governing body of that entity will typically issue each town an assessment for its operation. The town then includes its assessment as part of its budget.
If Town Meeting in one town votes to approve its assessment based on the figures provided, and Town Meeting in another town votes a lesser figure than it was assessed, the disagreement becomes problematic. (For example, if Xtown and Ytown run a high school together, and the total operating cost of the high school is $4,500,000, and Xtown sends 51% of the school's students, Xtown would be assessed $2,295,000 and Ytown would be assessed $2,205,000. An issue arises when Xtown votes $2,295,000 and Ytown only votes $2,100,000.)
If the issue cannot be resolved, the governing body may call a meeting of all registered voters from all towns involved: a Joint Town Meeting. The action of the Joint Town Meeting is binding for all involved communities.
When three or more towns are involved, the name often changes from Joint Town Meeting to Regional Town Meeting.
Case study
In 2003, the communities of Freetown and Lakeville held their annual town meetings and voted on the budget for the Freetown-Lakeville Regional School District as part of those meetings. Freetown voters approved a budget that reduced their contribution by $100,000 from what the Regional School Committee asked for, thus requiring Lakeville to lower their contribution proportionally. Lakeville voters instead approved the amount the Regional School Committee asked for, which would require Freetown to go back and approve the extra $100,000.
When the towns could not agree, the Regional School Committee, as governing body of the Freetown-Lakeville Regional School District, called a joint town meeting of voters from Freetown and Lakeville to agree on a single regional school budget. The meeting voted in favor of the amount originally requested, which required Freetown to give the additional $100,000 it had held back.
- Lakeville demands more Freetown funding (http://www.southcoasttoday.com/daily/08-03/08-08-03/a01lo005.htm) A newspaper article describing the joint town meeting.
External links
- Citizen's Guide to Town Meetings (http://www.sec.state.ma.us/cis/cistwn/twnidx.htm) prepared by William Francis Galvin, Secretary of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.
New Hampshire
New Hampshire towns and school districts have two types of annual meeting: Traditional meetings and ballot-voting meetings, known informally as SB2 after the title of the law that established it in 1995. State law also allows representative town meeting, in which voters elect a small number of residents to act as the legislative body, but as of 2004 no New Hampshire communities have instituted it.
In traditional meetings, voters gather in one spot at one time to debate and vote on issues in public. In ballot-voting meetings, they gather to discuss issues in February and then vote on them with secret ballots during all-day voting on election day, usually the second Tuesday in March.
SB2 was instituted by the state legislature in 1995 because of concern that modern lifestyle made it hard for people to attend traditional meetings. Municipalities can switch from traditional to SB2 meetings - or switch back - by a vote at annual meeting.
According to the University of New Hampshire Center for Public Policy studies, in 2002, 171 towns in New Hampshire had traditional town meeting, while 48 had SB2. Another 15 municipalities, most of them incorporated cities, had no annual meeting. The study found that 102 school districts had traditional town meeting, 64 had SB2 meeting and 10 had no annual meeting.
Because traditional-meeting communities tend to be smaller, only one-third of the state's population was governed by traditional town meetings in 2002, and only 22 percent by traditional school-district meetings.
External links
N.H. Center for Public Policy Studies report on SB2 (http://www.unh.edu/nhcpps/sb2at5.pdf)
Rhode Island
Vermont
All cities and towns in Vermont, except for South Burlington, are required by the terms of their charters to hold an annual town meeting, on Town Meeting Day (the first Tuesday in March). However, state law requires that all matters of consequence, including election of town officials and approval of town and district budgets, must be decided by Australian ballot. As a result, many towns actually hold their public meetings the Monday evening preceding Town Meeting Day, and reserve the official day itself for voting.
Day-to-day operations of cities and towns are governed by a town council or selectboard, which is fully empowered to act on most issues, but all town budgets (and those of other independent taxing authorities) must be approved by plebiscite; explaining the board's budget request to the voters is the principal business of Town Meeting. Voters at Town Meeting may also vote on non-binding resolutions, and may place items on the ballot for the following year's meeting.
Because all city and town charters are established by special legislation, there is no general requirement for municipalities to observe Town Meeting or to put their budgets to plebiscite. When the Town of South Burlington was re-chartered as the City of South Burlington in the 1950s, the new charter provided for city elections in April and required only budget increases of 10% or more per annum to be placed before voters. No other municipality has been granted such a charter by the legislature, and there is strong sentiment against making future exceptions.