Town meeting

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 that residents of the town or school district gather once a year to 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." A town meeting can also, more generally, refer to any moderated discussion group in which a large audience is invited, as in "John Kerry held a town meeting with Massachusetts voters to discuss issues in the upcoming election."

Connecticut

Maine

Massachusetts

Towns without Town Councils practice the Town Meeting form of government. There are two forms of town meeting:

• Open Town Meeting
  Open Town Meetings are required of towns with fewer than 6,000 residents, and optional for those with 6,000+ residents. The Board of Selectmen will call the town meeting by issuing the warrant, or, the list of things to be determined with descriptions of each item. The Moderator officiates the meeting by reading each article, explaining it, and making sure the rules of parliamentary procedure are followed. He interprets voice votes and counts other votes. The Finance Committee makes recommendations on articles dealing with money, and often authors 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
  Representative Town Meetings are optional for towns with 6,000+ residents. They function largely the same as an Open Town Meeting, only not all registered voters may vote. The townspeople instead elect from the ratable polls in their precinct Town Meeting Members to vote on the issues for them, much like a US Representative votes on behalf of his constituents in Congress. Depending on population, a town may have anywhere from 45 to 240 Town Meeting Members.

Annual Town Meetings

Annual Town Meetings are held in the spring, and may also be known as the Annual Budget Meeting. It is supposed be held between February 1 and May 31, but can be delayed until June 30th. 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. It may also vote on other non-budgetary issues on the warrant.

An item may be placed on the warrant by the Selectmen, 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.

Communities Still Using Town Meetings

(this list is incomplete)

Open Town Meeting: Abington, Acushnet, Aquinnah, Avon, Bedford, Bellingham, Berkley, Blackstone, Bridgewater, Canton, Carver, Chilmark, Cohasset, Dennis, Dighton, Dover, Duxbury, East Bridgewater, Eastham, Easton, Edgartown, Foxborough, Freetown, Gosnold, Halifax, Hanover, Hanson, Harwich, Hingham, Hopedale, Hull, Kingston, Lakeville, Mansfield, Marion, Marshfield, Mashpee, Mattapoisett, Medfield, Medway, Mendon, Middleborough, Millis, Millville, Nantucket, Norfolk, Norton, Norwell, Oak Bluffs, Orleans, Pembroke, Plainville, Plympton, Provincetown, Raynham, Rehoboth, Rochester, Rockland, Sandwich, Scituate, Sharon, Somerset, Swansea, Tisbury, Truro, Wareham, Wellfleet, West Bridgewater, West Tisbury, Westport, Westwood, Whitman, Wrentham, Yarmouth

Representative Town Meeting: Braintree, Brookline, Burlington, Dartmouth, Dedham, Fairhaven, Falmouth, Holbrook, Lexington, Milford, Milton, Needham, North Attleborough, Norwood, Plymouth, Randolph, Seekonk, Stoughton, Walpole, Wellesley, Weymouth

External link

• 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.

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 the 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.

However, 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 link

N.H. Center for Public Policy Studies report on SB2 (http://www.unh.edu/nhcpps/sb2at5.pdf)

Rhode Island

Vermont