Robert A. Oeser represents District 9 as a member of Brattleboro’s Representative Town Meeting.
BRATTLEBORO-Recently, I stumbled upon some inadvertent endorsements for a town meeting–style of governance I thought I would share.
In the video “I Drove To The Worst Place In Vermont. This Is What I Saw” (spoiler alert: It’s not that bad), the host raises the question about the values unique to Vermont. While acknowledging the rise in polarization in the country generally, a guest from Vermont zeroes in on “old school Vermont,” where everyone at Town Meeting argues with each other, but then has lunch and talks about what unites them.
In the “Guns, Division, and Violence in America” episode of The Coffee Klatch podcast, host Robert Reich and his guest, Heather Lofthouse, president of Inequality Media Civic Action, observe that democracy is not only about voting; it also requires thought. That is why deliberation is so important.
Simply pushing “yes” or “no” on your iPhone is not democracy. Democracy requires us to understand the issues and change our positions if there are good arguments on the other side.
In a clip of an Obama Foundation video, “How to Stop Authoritarianism Across the Globe: a Conversation with President Obama” (bit.ly/851-obama), Zuzanna Rudzińska-Bluszcz, undersecretary of state in the Ministry of Justice in Poland, notes that for some time, her country limited democracy to voting but democracy is something to be practiced, people need to be engaged and empowered. What a democracy needs is an active citizenry, she says.
After a review of these clips, I would wager the reader might now agree that deliberation is a piece of our town decision-making we do not want to lose. As Frank Bryan and John McClaughry argue in their 1989 book, The Vermont Papers: Recreating Democracy on a Human Scale:
“Town meeting government asserts the fundamental wisdom of the common person, sanctifies openness, abhors secrecy, holds the human spirit in the highest esteem, and is grounded in a fundamental trust that the truth will out in any free debate of citizens assembled,” they write.
Town Meetings, Bryan and McClaughry continue, “must have been in the mind of E.B. White when he conceived his classic definition of democracy: ‘the recurrent suspicion that more than half the people are right more than half of the time.’”
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That leaves us, then, with two choices: Open Town Meeting (OTM) or Representative Town Meeting (RTM). Currently we have RTM.
How did we get here? One factor was the size of the town. Our population hovers around 12,000 — too small to be considered a city and a bit too big to be grouped with the small towns.
In a 1989 Vermont Life article, “The Brattleboro Way: Is This The Future of Town Meeting?,” Fred Stetson wrote that by the 1960s, Brattleboro was “seeking stability and an escape from Town Meeting Day shenanigans.”
Then-Town Manager Corwin “Corky” Elwell talked about the previous traditional open Town Meeting. “At times it got pretty unruly. It really was a case of who could pack the meeting,” he said. “It was pretty easy for the proponents of an issue to get their troops there and approve whatever was needed. Of course, there was nothing illegal about it. It’s just not a very stable way to carry on a local government.”
A clear advantage of RTM is that it is indeed representative, in the way explained on the Brattleboro Town website: “The total number of town meeting representatives is based on the number of registered voters per district.”
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That being said, what needs to be changed?
Proponents of OTM believe the more open format will allow more voices to be heard. As a chair of one of the three districts, part of my job every year is to fill vacancies. And we usually have openings. Last year was more competitive than usual and allowed candidates to voice their reasons for serving. In addition, district meetings, held voluntarily during the year, allow residents to learn the process and become informed.
This is the goal: working towards an informed, engaged, and representative electorate to make the decisions at Town Meeting.
The essence of informed deliberation is served by RTM, as members have a stake in running for office, gathering signatures on petitions, talking to neighbors, and studying the issues before the meeting.
Let’s work to improve what we have — while we keep the strengths and address the weaknesses.
This Voices Viewpoint was submitted to The Commons.
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