The writer represents District 7 as a member of Brattleboro’s Representative Town Meeting.
BRATTLEBORO-I was excited to be elected as a new member of Representative Town Meeting in 2025. I had no prior experience in town government but was disenchanted with, in my opinion, recent costly bad decisions, lack of planning, and unnecessary spending, culminating in excessive increases in property taxes.
I am a retired caregiver for my 92-year-old mother and 78-year-old husband, a homeowner who is solely responsible for the work it takes to maintain a mother, a grandmother, and a dog mom. I have a full plate, as many do, but I committed myself to taking on the role of representing my neighbors at RTM and what I was hearing from them was: We can’t afford inordinately rising property taxes.
Off to Representative Town Meeting I went!
I walked in. The sign to the right read “masks” and the one to the left, “no masks.” I went right (my husband is immunocompromised), sat down, got comfortable, looked around, and didn’t see anyone I knew.
Over the course of the next few hours I learned I was sitting smack dab in the middle of a large contingent of people from the Human Services Committee who are also RTM members.
This group had a single agenda, and it was not representing their town, or their district’s constituents. It was representing the Human Services Committee. When the subject at hand pertained to human services, they collaborated, they planned their response, and they ran to the microphone. When the topic was not human services, they were chatting, eating lunch (prior to the break) opening 20 to 30 brown paper bags quite noisily, and checking cell phones.
At one point I asked them to be quiet because I wanted to hear all topics of discussion. I was fully engaged. They were not.
No one spoke to me or introduced themselves. I wasn’t welcomed into the community they speak of, or collaborated with in the manner they claim. There were zero meaningful discussions that included me.
At some point — I’m assuming from my vocal Facebook posts and anti-spending sentiment — they realized who I was. I asked a fellow RTM member to nominate me, the person no one spoke to, for the Human Services Committee. When she did, I heard a collective “Ugh!” from the people sitting around me. They didn’t want an outsider in their clique and certainly not someone who wouldn’t support a nearly half-million-dollar human services budget.
Later on in the day, when people were selected for the Human Services Committee, the committee that decides how to spend our money, and the committee who asked as many nonprofits they could find (per the committee chair at the behest of then-Selectboard Chair Daniel Quipp) to send them their requests for money from Brattleboro taxpayers, the chair jumped up and nominated the first group of people, all of whom had been on the committee.
The moderator stood silent as all the committee members were immediately chosen. Was it fair to have a committee selected so undemocratically?
I left the meeting believing that all voters were not being represented fairly.
Vote yes to discontinue Representative Town Meeting. Vote yes to adopt the Australian ballot. Vote no to adopt open Town Meeting.
Ruth Houle
Brattleboro
The writer represents District 7 as a member of Brattleboro’s Representative Town Meeting.
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