By Paul Mills
The Town Meeting: The attempts by King George and Parliament to abolish it in 1774 was one of the sparks that led Paul Revere and John Hancock to incite the Revolution which soon followed.
The Revolution gave rise to its revival. Town meetings were still being conducted in Boston even by the time Maine became a state in 1820. (Boston didn’t become a city until after our separation from Massachusetts.)
The town meeting was also the form of government for Portland until 1832. It’s still the most popular form in Maine, conducted in some 400 of the state’s 489 municipalities.
As in the time of Revere and Hancock, the meeting is still an instrumentality of lodging protests with more remote forms of governments. In New Vineyard this year, for example, First Selectman Fay Adams pounded away at the state’s curtailment of Homestead exemption reimbursement and the threatened cut backs on revenue sharing. Legislator Russ Black assured the town that he was sponsoring a bill to protect local governments’ share of state tax revenues.
Adams’s skepticism over whether other legislators will go along with Black gave rise to an unusual motion by her this year: reduce the salaries for the three-person selectmen’s board from $7,200 to $6,600. Though a fiscally conservative Republican stronghold, the town nevertheless overrode her motion and voted to maintain the salaries at last year’s levels.
At nearly the same time as New Vineyard citizens were flexing their democratic muscles, so too was the Kennebec County town of Vienna, some 25 miles to the south. Over 61 percent or some 280 of its registered voters turned out to vote on a variety of local contests including road commissioner, town clerk and tax collector. This is a percentage similar to that achieved a year ago. These are unusually high turnouts for local elections anywhere in Maine. The fact that Vienna is near the top in such civic attributes should come as no surprise to those familiar with its culture. The local Grange there, for example, is the largest of any in the state, this in a community with a total population that registered a mere 570 in the 2010 census.
It’s obviously a town never visited by Robert Putnam when he penned his Bowling Alone, a book which ridiculed the unsocial tendencies of modern American culture.
One of its more memorable leaders a few years ago was Coloman Von Graff. Though a broken English speaking native of the Vienna region of Austria, he was a widely acclaimed member of the Vienna, Maine Board of Selectmen in the 1970s and 1980s. As with New Vineyard’s Fay Adams, Von Graff harbored a resentment of centralized government, even going so far as to lead the town’s successful lawsuit against the state for over-valuing property in the community. (An over valuation by the state results in a reduction of state payments for municipal and school district subsidies.)
Significant voter participation also characterized this year’s New Sharon town meeting, where a sizable portion of the town’s registered voters turned out. Attracting the most attention to the 160 on hand was the road commissioner’s race. There was no shortage of talented people seeking the position. It was a three-way contest in which all candidates stepped forward and made informed presentations.
The candidates then responded to questions rained down upon them from all corners of the Cape Cod Hill School gymnasium. It’s a procedure similar to prime minister’s question time in the Canadian Parliament. Local contractor John Pond emerged victorious after vowing to withhold pay from contractors unless work is satisfactorily completed.
“Either the work is going to be done and done right or they’re not getting paid,” he promised.
Though the Maine town meeting continues to thrive, one element of it for most towns in recent decades has undergone significant surgery. That’s the change in the way town officers are elected. The traditional system is like New Sharon’s whereby candidates are nominated from the floor who then make a few remarks and respond to questions. Voters then proceed to write down on a blank piece of paper their choice. If no candidate achieves a majority, which often occurs in a multi-candidate race, then the voting goes into a second and sometimes even a third set of balloting, all in the same meeting.
The new system is substantially the same used by candidates for state office. It’s one where aspirants circulate and file petitions several weeks ahead of the election. They’re then elected by voters casting ballots either absentee or in the privacy of a voting booth. There’s no run-off and the plurality rather than the majority winner is elected.
Though the new system offers the advantage of allowing absentee voting, the public is often shortchanged. That’s because those voting are not guaranteed the kind of communion with the candidates offered by the traditional face to face question and answer system of the older system. The absence of a run-off procedure can also be a drawback.
Moreover, under the traditional system a credible but losing candidate for one office can then be chosen for another at the same meeting. A candidate who misses by a few votes being elected to one of the selectmen’s positions can just 15 minutes or so later be a candidate for another town office. The candidate that voters may not want for first selectman may well be one that voters choose to install for second selectman or some other position.
The advantages of the traditional system are such that 11 municipalities in Franklin County, for example, continue to observe it. It’s also one by which John Hancock was elected a selectman in Boston. It’s one with which both Hancock and Paul Revere would, I think, feel right at home.
Paul Mills is a Farmington attorney who has moderated over 135 town meetings in Maine including this year’s New Vineyard, New Sharon, Mercer, and Industry meetings. He can be reached at pmills@myfairpoint.net.
Paul is certainly right about Coloman Von Graff’s spirited resentment of centralized government. He once recruited me to accompany him to a meeting with D.E.P. honchos to debate their mandate that we close down our old Town Dump. When the D.E.P. guy outlined what we would have to do Coloman shot back in that high-pitched Austrian accent I can still hear: “You are Creezy as Hell! Ve are not gonna do dat! It would cost the Town Tirty thousand dollars!” $30,000 was often his go-to estimate of cost for what he considered extravagant town expenditures. Well, as might be expected, D.E.P. ultimately prevailed, which was a good thing. The Town dump was an almost post-apocalyptic hell of flaming carcinogens, broken glass from TV tubes and light bulbs which would explode from the heat of our burning refuse. Sometimes Big Brother gets it right. But Coloman was a fine man who did a lot for Vienna. He had an authentic old-fashioned sense of noblesse oblige. It was a great privilege to have known him.
Thanks to Paul Mills for reminding us what an important legacy we have in the New England town meeting. As Mr. Mills points out, many tributes have been paid to this institution. One of the most impressive came from a brilliant young Frenchman named Alexis de Tocqueville, who visited our still new nation in 1831, traveled around it from north to south and as far west as the Mississippi, and returned to France to publish “Democracy in America,” which is still considered one of the profoundest studies of our culture and our politics, and as relevant today as when it first appeared. Tocqueville points to the history and continuing vigor of the town meeting form of government in New England as a primary reason for optimism about the future of the United States. In the history of New England, he declares, we can discern “the germ and gradual development of that township independence which is the life and mainspring of American liberty today.” May we pass on the legacy of town meetings undiminished!
I think Paul is right with respect for the value of elections on the day of the town meeting. He gives compelling reasons to keep the system we have in New Sharon. His article is very interesting and informative.