I’ll tell you truly: I’m still largely a believer in the financial town meeting. It forces interested residents into a place where they at least have a chance to hear competing arguments. Whether or not they change their votes, they certainly cannot claim not to have heard warnings and considered alternatives. So, I’m watching this development, as reported in the Newport Daily News, with a degree of disconnect:
Town Councilman Cecil Leonard, Budget Committee Chairman Jeff Caron and former councilman Brian Medeiros have made independent requests to the council to consider some town charter amendments relating to the financial town meeting.
A workshop has been scheduled for Monday at 7 p.m. at Town Hall, 343 Highland Road. “Tiverton clearly has outgrown the FTM,” Medeiros wrote in a letter proposing to “keep the good aspects of our current system, while replacing the many difficult, unworkable aspects of the current FTM.”
A couple of years ago, a similar effort arose from the observation that nobody was interested in the FTM, and the town had trouble securing a quorum to pass the budget. Now it’s a topic of interest because too many fully committed activist types are making a battlefield of the meeting. To me, that looks like the process of Tiverton relearning how to sustain a democratic governing system in which opposing parties actually exist.
Problems exist, to be sure. I most definitely empathize with parents who fear to vote publicly in contravention of their children’s teachers. A week ago, in order to retrieve one of my children at the end of the school day, I had to sign a form handed to me by a woman in an NEA Tiverton t-shirt. One doesn’t have to inflate such experiences into a sinister plot in order to think the symbolism significant and likely to have an effect on parents. It’s also easier to motivate people to attend an all-morning budget meeting when the votes that they’ll cast, there, will determine salaries or services that they receive far in excess of the cost to them. In other words, those who would increase the budget and provide the services have a natural advantage with the current system.
Still, I foresee problems with the proposed alternatives:
The voters of Tiverton should remain the governing body, or those who make the final decision on the budget, but instead of attending an hours-long meeting or two, voters could approve or reject a budget during an all-day referendum, Medeiros said. …
Caron is advocating that an annual financial town election replace the financial town meeting. “The concept is to replace the meeting with a secret ballot election; altering the Charter only as necessary so that electors vote the annual appropriations/levies in a secret ballot election rather than at a physical meeting,” he wrote.
In a reversed reflection of the difficulty that residents may have standing in opposition to their neighbors, people only mildly interested in the politics may find it all too easy to vote according to partisan interests and vague impressions when there’s nobody in the voting booth to stand up and make his or her case.
None of this should suggest that I’m advocating one plan over another, or over no change at all. I said I’m a believer in the FTM, but I’m not a believer in our town’s system of governance (or our state’s, for that matter). We’re locked in to a long, slow, self-perpetuating downward spiral, and it’s reasonable to expect that Jeff Caron’s plan for an “FTM election,” of sorts, would create an opening for those whose motivation is only the gradually expanding open wound of annual tax increases.
Loading ...