UndercoverElephant wrote:vtsnowedin wrote:
Are you familiar with the New England "town meeting" form of government?
Only vaguely.
You have an open meeting of the legal voters in the town warned for the first Tuesday in March. Other meetings at other times can be warned if needed. At this meeting the town officers are elected. The list includes:
Selectman Or select-woman three to seven depending on the size of the town.
Lister (Real estate appraiser) three
Delinquent tax collector one
Auditors three
Constable one
Trustee of public money three
Cemetery commissioner five
Trustee of the public library five
Grand Juror one
Town agent (Barrister) one
I have the warning for this years meeting before me in the town report which has just arrived. It warns fifteen articles where article one is to elect a moderator for the meeting, Article five is to elect those officers in the list above whose rotating terms are up and article fourteen is to raise money to pay the indebtedness and current expenses of the town for the ensuing year.
Between meetings the town is run by the selectboard which meets weekly and a town administrator they employ who also happens to be the town treasurer an elected office with a three year term that doesn't happen to be up this year.
This works fine for small towns of under say 10,000 in population but gets unmanageable when more then a few hundred show up and wish to move articles from the floor. Larger towns move to Aldermen/Mayor systems to deal with this.
It would all work better if most of the decisions were not mandated by state and federal law but that is another story.
This system has been worked out over two centuries of trial and error and finding a fairer more effective system will be no small task.