Direct Democracy…In Person and Online

Last night was the twice-a-year Town Meeting in my town of Hadley, Massachusetts. We still have an old-style New England Town Meeting, where any registered voter can speak (about issues already on the agenda, anyway) and vote. And these votes really do shape the town; every zoning change, for instance, has to get a 2/3 supermajority at Town Meeting.

During the Save the Mountain campaign several years ago, for instance, one of my neighbors submitted a citizen petition to restrict the altitude of a building lot. She gathered the requisite number of signatures,w e organized turnout at the meeting, and her new bylaw was overwhelmingly adopted, along with some others we’d put in.

But some financial outlays are a two-step process. First, Town Meeting approves them, and then, a paper-ballot election is held at a later date, to appropriate the funding.

Last night, a longtime citizen environmental activist raised the point that we
d passed some of these improvements several times, but they kept getting voted down in the later election because most people didn’t know when that election would take place. She asked if the election date could be announced at Town Meeting, but the Selectmen (kind of like a Town council) hadn’t set the date yet.

So I stepped to the microphone and offered to create an e-mail notification list. Then I went home and set up an announce-only newsletter on yahoogroups with this mission statement:

An announce-only media channel to notify residents of Hadley, Massachusetts of upcoming votes and meetings of town boards, committees, and commissions. This non-partisan list will not take positions on any issues. It is solely to notify the public of upcoming votes and meetings. It will distribute information as received; the listowners make no promises or claims regarding the completeness or accuracy of information received. We just want to help get the word out.

By phrasing it as a “media channel,” and by not stating opinions on the matters before us, I will be able to receive and forward the press releases from the town administrator, and hopefully over time several hundred people will be able to learn the dates of the elections in time to vote.

Seems like this is a pretty good model for lots of communities. It costs nothing to set up, and I’m anticipating a whole year of administering the list will add under an hour to my workload. We’ll see how it works.