BRATTLEBORO-Brattleboro’s Charter Revision Commission reconvened May 14 for the first time since August to try to make sense of the thorny question left by the March 3 election, when voters approved two ballot measures pointing in different directions.
One measure eliminated the town’s Representative Town Meeting (RTM) in favor of an Open Town Meeting, where any registered voter may attend and participate.
The other called for replacing the RTM with an Australian ballot system, in which residents vote on budgetary questions by secret ballot rather than by a show of hands in a meeting hall.
Both passed, but both, taken together, may be impossible to fully satisfy at once. And yet, if the town officials and voters don’t agree upon a proposal in relatively short order, the Legislature will likely decide for them.
“We’re either going to get nothing out of the Legislature, or we’re going to get something that we might not like,” said Commission Chair Kate O’Connor at group’s May 14 meeting. “So I think it’s really incumbent upon us, as a Charter Revision Commission, at the very least, to take this meeting and the next meeting to really look into what the possibilities are of doing both.”
O’Connor said she didn’t want “to throw up my hands at this meeting and say, ‘There is no way,’ because I think we owe it to our community members, because this is long-term.”
“But I want it to be in our hands and not people in Montpelier who know nothing about us,” she said. “They aren’t going to be the ones doing what they decide that we’re going to do. They could very well decide something for us that we don’t like.”
What it means
Initially, the Commission had been prepared to send its own set of charter changes to a special election but paused its work after two citizens’ petitions — one for an Australian ballot system and another for an open Town Meeting (OTM) system — were placed on the ballot.
Voters passed both petitions, deciding to discontinue the RTM in favor of both OTM and an Australian ballot.
The approved changes are now with the state Legislature but will not be addressed this year due to timing. The Commission is now tasked with reconciling these dual and potentially conflicting voter mandates with its three years of charter revision work and providing clear direction to state lawmakers.
Speakers advocated for a hybrid model that would preserve open deliberation while giving all residents — not just those who can attend a weeknight meeting — a budget vote.
Some say that data showing that between 377 and 512 people voted “yes” on both initiatives indicate support for a combined approach, but commissioners remain split on what the results actually require them to do.
Some members believe the Commission’s existing charter draft — three years in the making — already addresses the situation, pointing to a provision allowing a petition signed by 5% of voters to trigger a town-wide ballot on any meeting decision.
Others say that mechanism would be insufficient and that a second vote should happen automatically whenever financial questions are decided.
“We were thorough in our work that led up to what is currently in our set of recommendations,” said Commissioner and former Town Manager Peter Elwell, calling the current task “an awkward spot that we need to reconcile.”
“I feel like we need to work harder at seeing how the two might work together,“ he said. “But consider the things we need to consider about both the logistics and what’s good for our local democracy. And if that lands us in a place where we think there is a better system or at least a system that more thoroughly integrates these two different methods as opposed to what we’ve already done, I totally agree.”
He called the content of the proposed charter “more empowering for Australian ballot proponents than what our system has had in town government up until now, but it’s got the big missing piece of the budget, which was really the focus of a lot of the discussion around the election.”
Calling the underlying 1,216 to 1,157 vote to discontinue RTM “very close,” Elwell went on to say “for open Town Meeting and for Australian ballot, I think it’s reasonable for us to consider how the two things work together. But I don’t think it would be appropriate for us to just reflect on the volume and depth of our previous consideration and land there without exploring some of these other options.”
Commissioner Hannah Clarisse respectfully disagreed, while adding she understands and appreciates “the desire to try and look at how we can make everything happen.”
“But we can’t make everything happen. And we’ve put a lot of time and work into this,” Clarisse said, adding that she is “really happy with the document we have.”
“I think our goal is to come up with something that’s functional for the town, not something that’s going to make every single person happy,” she said. “And I think that we’ve done that.”
Panel eyes three options
The Commission is now weighing three structural options:
• An open Town Meeting followed automatically by a town-wide ballot on all financial questions.
• The same sequence but trigger the ballot vote only under defined conditions, such as a narrow margin or a citizen petition.
• The third — and most logistically ambitious — would reverse the order entirely: Hold an informational session in mid-January and then put all budget questions to Australian ballot on the first Tuesday in March.
The third option faces significant obstacles, including that the budget process would have to be completed by December and that any change to the state-mandated March meeting date would require legislative approval.
Town Clerk Hilary Francis laid out the financial stakes plainly, pointing out that an open Town Meeting costs roughly $7,000. A full Australian ballot election runs from $20,000 to $21,000 and requires six weeks lead time.
A hybrid model combining both would effectively create two separate election cycles, driving costs upward and potentially conflicting with the August primary calendar.
Francis said her office already logs about 1,700 hours per year on elections and would likely need additional staff to absorb another mandatory vote.
Commissioners floated cost-cutting measures, including relying primarily on mail-in ballots and using hand-counting for simple single-question ballots, with the Town Clerk’s office serving as the only in-person polling location.
Beyond the governance structure, the Commission also discussed other pending charter changes: the role of the finance committee following the dissolution of the Representative Town Meeting; reducing the Human Services Committee from 11 members to nine; and updating language in the charter’s finance section to reflect any new meeting timelines.
A recurring concern throughout the session was the possibility that delay or internal disagreement could remove the decision from local hands altogether.
If the Commission cannot produce a unified proposal for voters to consider in November, state legislators may end up deciding how Brattleboro governs itself.
Elwell and O’Connor will now draft a framework of scenarios with pros and cons for each option to present at the next commission meeting on Thursday, May 28.
A public education campaign will be needed before any charter proposal goes to voters, commissioners agree. They’ve set May or June as a target for completing their work in view of a potential Nov. 4 ballot question.
This News item by Virginia Ray was written for The Commons.