WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass. — The Charter Review Committee last week discussed whether the town should consider creating a mechanism for ballot votes to approve questions normally decided by town meeting.

 

Chair Andrew Hogeland told his colleagues at their June 15 meeting that any such move would be unique in the commonwealth, but he cited a couple of precedents where other communities have taken steps in that direction.

 

"The [Massachusetts Municipal Association] lawyer had two examples," Hogeland said. "Lexington put a bylaw in place 40 years ago which had allowed a subsequent election to repeal a zoning bylaw [passed by town meeting]. And he gave the example of Manchester-by-the-Sea, which requires any debt item over a million dollars to be by ballot.

 

"Minimal examples, and they're fairly limited. If we were to do this, I think we'd be breaking new ground."

 

"This" is an idea that has been bandied about informally in local government for some time: essentially continuing the town meeting process from its traditional one-night format into a second day, on which all registered voters would be eligible to vote on certain articles, like zoning bylaw amendments, that result from the physical meeting.

 

"The idea is you would have your in-person town meeting, and you could vote on some or all of the articles, like today, or have some deferred to a ballot vote later," Hogeland said. "The final version of some or all would be put on a ballot. So instead of 350 people at town meeting voting on everything, some set would go to a ballot vote."

 

Town officials for years have been looking for ways to increase participation at the annual town meeting and, some argue, make it more reflective of the sentiment of a wider range of residents.

 

Since more people, typically, vote in May's local elections then attend the town meeting, some have suggested that questions are better answered by a daylong ballot vote.

 

Hogeland pointed out one potential issue with the two-stage process: The time it takes to draft and post a ballot prior to a second town election likely would push the final vote off for a couple of months after the town meeting in May.

 

But, he noted, such a delay conceivably would allow more residents to learn about the issues they would face at the polls.

 

Another issue is that the town cannot implement such a procedure on its own.

 

"It could be allowed by special legislation," Hogeland said. "The method to do so would be to propose an amendment to our charter and see if the legislature would pass it."

 

Hogeland noted that while no provision for a ballot box component to town meeting exists in Massachusetts General Law, neighboring Vermont does allow municipalities to implement an "Australian ballot" system for deciding all questions before the town.

 

Some in Williamstown have suggested that the Australian ballot would be more democratic and would address the issue of low participation at the annual town meeting.

 

The Charter Review Committee last week reviewed the results of a survey it mailed out to determine why more residents do not attend the meeting, and problems like inconvenient scheduling and the length of the meeting were among the top responses.

 

"I'm attracted to [Australian ballot] because it does seem to address two flaws in the current system," Nate Budington said. "One is that really important decisions for the town are being made by very small percentages of the population, which seems fairly consistent in town meeting. And the access issue, which we saw come up in the survey … this would address most if not all of those access issues."

 

Anne Skinner disagreed.

 

"I'm opposed to this," she said. "I'd like to see if there are other ways to increase participation in town meeting before we go to something like this, which completely changes the nature of town decisions.

 

"To not make them at town meeting, to have people who didn't come to town meeting decide what the results are going to be, I'm not in favor of that."

 

Skinner suggested that if the final decisions are made at the ballot box weeks later, people will be even less inclined to attend the meeting itself.

 

"To Anne's point, you can try shorter meetings," Hogeland said. "There may be more than one meeting. I talked to another open town meeting person the other day, and their meeting ran on three consecutive nights."

 

On the other hand, Hogeland disagreed with Skinner's assertion that the ballot would render the meeting irrelevant.

 

"That's still where all the debates happen," Hogeland said. "That's still where all the amendments happen."

 

The committee last week took no votes on whether to include a recommendation on the Australian ballot question in its final report to the Select Board, which formed the Charter Review Committee last summer.

 

That report will include information from the survey it sent to residents earlier this year. Hogeland said that the questionnaire was mailed out with 2,500 property tax bills, and the committee sent an additional 600 surveys to residents believed to be tenants in rental properties in town.

 

The committee received just more than 500 responses to the survey, which is inline with other recent townwide surveys from town hall, Hogeland said.

 

The respondents skewed older, with 50 percent identifying as aged 70 or up. Another 22 percent identified as between the ages of 60 and 70, Hogeland said.

 

Hogeland went through some highlights of the survey responses during last week's meeting, including that 64 percent of respondents wanted a recall provision for local offices, 70 percent favored continuing the current balance of power between the Select Board and town manager and 68 percent wanted to continue the open form of town meeting instead of moving to a representative town meeting.

 

Narrower margins were seen on a couple of other issues. Forty-nine percent of respondents were against implementing term limits for local offices with 33 percent indicating they would like to see limits. On the issue of ranked-choice voting in local elections, 51 percent responded favorably, but 22 percent of the respondents said they needed more information before expressing a preference.