Following complications with the Waldoboro town budget this year, many residents expressed dissatisfaction with the current town meeting process. Several residents plan to begin circulating a petition to revert to open town meetings.
Currently, the town holds its town meetings by referendum, which some residents feel does not provide enough interaction between voters and town officials.
At open town meetings, residents gather and discuss the articles prior to voting. This provides an opportunity to inform residents who may be unclear about the purpose of an article and to amend articles prior to voting.
This year at the polls, voters rejected the budgets of the office of the town manager, the assessing department and the planning and development office. Because the town is required by state law to have a town manager and a code enforcement officer – whose salary is paid out of the planning and development budget – those budgets had to be revisited at a Waldoboro Special Town Meeting.
Complications arose because the Waldoboro fiscal year ended June 30, just weeks after town meeting.
Voters also rejected an article that would have allowed the town to use last year’s budget figures to fund three months of those departments’ operations while town officials reworked the proposed budgets and held another vote.
Because the town did not have the extra time, they had to hold an open special town meeting in order to have the budgets in place before the start of the fiscal year. All of the budgets were approved without amendment at the special town meeting.
Widespread confusion about the process this year and dissatisfaction with referendum voting have left some residents calling for the return of open town meetings.
“I’ve heard a lot of sentiment from people who feel they’re not being heard,” said Charlotte Davenhill, a Waldoboro resident who is spearheading the petition to return to open town meetings. “At the polls, you can be heard, but you can’t express yourself.”
Davenhill feels without an opportunity to gather as a community and discuss the issues, many residents are not given an opportunity to weigh-in on town decisions.
“At referendum, your only choice is ‘yes’ or ‘no,'” Davenhill said. “Not being able to amend the articles leads to problems like we had this year.”
Open town meetings allow some residents to receive a civics lesson they might otherwise miss out on, Davenhill argues. Davenhill, a former Waldoboro Selectman, got her start in town politics because of open town meetings, she said.
“I had never felt like town government was accessible before I went to my first town meeting,” she said. “I left with an understanding of how the town government worked and a feeling that I could actually have an impact.”
This is not the first time that the issue of how to hold town meeting has been raised in Waldoboro. In the last decade, Waldoboro has switched between open town meeting and referendum voting three times.
Historically, New Englanders have been arguing about the fairness of different versions of town meeting for more than 150 years, Davenhill said.
Waldoboro resident Ronnie Miller, who led the effort to begin referendum voting in Waldoboro, called the idea of going back to open town meeting “ridiculous.”
“Just because a couple hundred people showed up to this [year’s special town meeting] doesn’t mean they will in the future,” Miller said. Two hundred twenty-nine people attended the special town meeting this year, an exceptionally high turnout.
“You don’t have the number of people attending open town meetings that you need to make a fair decision. Waldoboro has too many people to have a town meeting,” Miller said.
Miller argues referendum voting gives more people an opportunity to vote. This year, 1400 people cast votes in the referendum town meeting.
“People can vote in the morning, they can vote from the comfort of their homes, and not everyone is able to go to an open town meeting,” Miller said.
Miller’s mother is 94 years old and lives in a nursing home, he said. “She still wants to vote. By holding open town meeting, they’re telling her she can’t vote.”
If members of the public want to learn about the issues on the ballot and amend them, they should attend the series of public hearings that the selectmen, planning board and budget committee hold every year leading up to town meeting, Miller pointed out.
Miller and Davenhill both agreed that a big part of the problem is that so few people attend those hearings. “In a perfect world, people would be voting on the articles they want because they attended the public hearings and told town officials what they want,” Davenhill said.
Miller argued that even if the public hearings are not attended, if voters approve the article that gives town government more time to rework budget items that fail, voters will still get to have their say.
“The only problem this year was that the article to give more time failed,” Miller asserted.
Following the failure of the municipal budgets, the board of selectmen bemoaned the fact they were forced to hold the revote at an open town meeting, and were concerned the process was unfair. If they had more time, they would have reconvened the budget committee and held another referendum vote, the board said at the time.
“You’re really not giving up anything in a referendum,” Miller said.
If the petition is successful, Davenhill and her supporters hope to bring the decision about how to hold town meeting before the voters at the November election.
Miller said if it passes, and Waldoboro returns to open town meeting, he would start the fight to bring back referendum again. However, Miller is not seriously concerned about that prospect.
“Last time, there were people jumping out of the woods to support the petition to go to referendum voting,” he said. “When it went to the vote, it was a landslide.”
The decision as to how the town holds town meeting lies solely with the selectmen, said Waldoboro Town Manager William Post. The petition and town wide votes on the issues are actually unnecessary.
In the past, the selectmen have opted to put the issue to a town wide vote, but they are legally allowed to make the decision on their own, Post said.