Listening to the People

Americans outside of New England think that a town meeting is a place where politicians answer questions asked by regular people. The politician’s answers are supposed to help those regular people, and anyone watching the event on TV, to decide whom to vote for in an upcoming election or primary.

There are different reasons why people take the idea of the town meeting and turn it into a talk show. Maybe you’re a news network desperate for a format that will make political discussions more interesting (and get higher ratings). Maybe you’re a campaign trying to look like you’re listening to the people.

These artificial town meetings don’t decide anything. Real town meetings are all about decisions.

In Connecticut, we have public hearings when we just want to talk about something before voting on it, and regular or special board meetings just won’t do. We use public hearings to ask questions that will lead to eventual decisions. Of course, many of the questions being asked are the kind that the person doing the asking already knows the answer to. But even those questions can sometimes be good.

The networks are not going to use the term public hearing. Those things, the Washington kind, belong on C-SPAN.

(A hearing as seen on C-SPAN is what happens when congressmen or senators get together and question various experts. The questions come from staff members who are paid to do the thinking for people who need all their brain power to figure out how to raise enough money to get re-elected. The staff members get the questions from lobbyists. You see a lot of talking in these things, and there must be hearing going on because of all those ears in the room, but there doesn’t seem to be a whole lot of listening.)

C-SPAN’s tagline is “Created by Cable. Offered as a Public Service.” I imagine morale isn’t very high among people who work at C-SPAN. The public service, I think, is to isolate these things in one place that can be easily avoided by the casual viewing public. Whenever there are hearings on topics of real national importance, those end up leaking over to the real news networks. That lets a broader audience tune in and learn more about, for example, whether Roger Clemens or his trainer is more of a big fat liar about who took steroids and when.

New Englanders know that a town meeting is when they come together to decide on what the town should do, particularly when it comes to spending money. Every property owner can take part, making the New England town meeting the most democratic form of government in the world.

Swiss cantons are the only other example where the assembled landowners of a town are the lawmaking body.

Think about it: property owners are the ones who decide how much their property taxes are going up each year.

You don’t get a choice like that with your federal income taxes, or your social security taxes. Not that such a system would be possible.

Sure, we have a Board of Finance to worry about the details and keep things reasonable, and a helpful flyer in this very paper telling us to take out our anger over the 20% increase in the price of gas by refusing to support the school budget. But in the end, it’s up to us to decide.

Curiously, not all New Englanders care for or take much pride in having the most democratic form of government in the world. And not all of these people who don’t care for the idea are members of the Board of Finance, either.

It may only look like once you’re on the Board of Finance you acquire an aversion to things like town meetings and petitions. I think there’s more to it than that.

I think members of the Board of Finance take their responsibilities very seriously. Over the past five years, the BOF has helped maintain and improve this town’s financial situation, the way we handle our medical insurance fund, and our bond rating. Property taxes have not gone up nearly as fast as they might, or as they have for some of the towns around us. Costs are under control.

Let’s not forget there are others who are also responsible for this: the members of the Board of Selectmen and the Board of Education, the town’s finance department, all of the other departments in town, and the administrators of our schools.

But when it comes to spending, the BOF is ever vigilant. We are talking about six members of a board who are elected for terms lasting up to six years, as well as three alternates who, while they don’t get to vote at every meeting, do have to know just as much about the budget, and do get to ask as many questions as they want.

So when a petition comes in that has been signed by as few as twenty people, and can force the town to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars, you can see why BOF members get a little touchy. These petitions can end up being decided upon at one of our town meetings, and those can have rather limited attendance.

Most of the time, whenever a significant issue comes to the town in the form of a petition, the BOS has tried to get those questions removed to a referendum. Having something decided by a machine vote lets a lot more voters take part in the decision. Given the costs involved in having a referendum, timing these things to go with the annual budget referendum makes a great deal of sense, and saves the town thousands of dollars.

Petitions are a necessary part of this form of government. We are the legislative body, and we need a way to bring an issue before us. Waiting for boards to get their acts together sometimes doesn’t work. Having a way to bypass them is essential. Any attempt to limit that ability is an attack on our right of self-government. Let’s not give that up.

The system works. Once again, this Saturday, the town spoke, and an issue that some felt was certain to pass, that was supposed to have overwhelming support, failed. It failed by a lot. The people have spoken. Let’s trust them to keep on making the right decisions for the town.

Let’s keep on listening to the people.