Growth Tests New England System : Town Meeting Day: When Yankees Make Decisions

Ernie Barrett thought the plan to ring the vandalism-plagued West Side Cemetery with an $18,000, barbed-wire-topped fence was “hideous.” He talked the town out of it the other night.

Patty Rotch had reservations about a $2-million scheme for renovating Milford’s 118-year-old Town Hall, so she and her neighbors voted to put it on hold.

And Michelle Barg was none too crazy about spending $250,000 to clear away two old houses near the center of town to make room for municipal employee parking. That idea also was soundly rejected when Bob Philbrick asked the townspeople to voice their “yeas” and “nays.”

Not every spending plan put before them was turned down, but the people of Milford showed plenty of good old New England parsimony when about 900 of them crowded into the high school gym on a blustery, cold March night to decide how their town would be run for the next year.

At the same time, thousands of other New Hampshire townsfolk were gathering in gyms, auditoriums and rustic meeting halls warmed by potbellied stoves to argue over the sewers they would build, police cruisers they would buy or taxes they would charge themselves in the coming months.

Over in Plainfield, folks not only decided to spend $11,000 to buy a roadside mower, they also voted to designate an official town mollusk--the Dwarf Wedge Mussel, which has been disappearing from the Blow-me-down Brook that cuts through town.

It was town meeting day, a New England institution as rich as the sap that runs from the maples this time of year. Rooted in the traditional Yankee distrust of authority, the annual town meeting is democracy in its purest form, a mass gathering that remains the ultimate decision-making body in many small and mid-sized New England communities. The meeting offers every voter the chance to have his or her say on virtually every facet of a town’s operation.

Although the townspeople elect leaders, called selectmen, to manage municipal affairs and carry out policy, there is little the selectmen can do without first getting authorization from the once-a-year meeting. It is a kind of super town council that, theoretically, could encompass every adult in town if everyone decided to show up.

Special Sessions Rare

No town budget can be approved, no money spent, no zoning designation changed, no employee hired or equipment purchased without the meeting’s go-ahead. Unforeseen emergencies--say, an urgent need to replace a broken-down fire truck--can be dealt with only if selectmen get a court order for a special town meeting.

Outsiders used to entrusting the minutiae of local government to their elected councils may think this system cumbersome and unwieldy, but many New Englanders swear by it.

“People here are interested in where their money goes,” said Bob Seavey, 70, at one time Milford’s volunteer fire warden and a participant in meetings here for half a century.

“This is the only form of government where, when I see a municipal truck go down the street, I know it’s my truck.”

Town meetings have been a fixture of government in these parts since the early Colonial days. They evolved from the congregational church system that dominated the lives of the Puritan settlers. Church members, rather than ministers, made the important decisions for the church, which was the center of social life in early New England.

“Church meeting was really the equivalent of a town meeting,” said Joe Ford, a specialist in local government at the University of New Hampshire.

Daylong Social Event

Over the years, the meeting became a social event in the community as well as a political one. It would start in the morning at the Town Hall, break for a noonday meal of ham and beans cooked by the ladies’ auxiliary of a church or Grange group, and resume in the afternoon with liquor aplenty passed around to oil the oratory.

Some of the quaintness has begun to wear under the strains of modern life. Milford’s population has soared from 4,000 to 10,000 over the last decade, with an influx of technology industries, and the meeting long ago outgrew its Town Hall quarters. Doughnuts and coffee have replaced the communal meal, and sessions now begin at night--after work--and usually stretch well into a second evening.

After Philbrick, the elected moderator of the proceedings, called the town’s 194th annual meeting to order the other day, he unfolded an agenda--called a warrant in local parlance--that filled a 14-foot-long computer printout.

Most of the items for consideration had been drafted by the town’s five selectmen, but not all. Under state law, it takes as few as 10 signatures on a petition to force a question onto the town warrant.

The townspeople debated whether to spend $20,000 to repave 4,300 feet of West Street (they finally said “yes”), and whether to rebuild $549,000 worth of storm sewers (“no”). And they voted to hire the first full-time fire chief since Milford was incorporated in 1794.

Honored in Defeat

Some of the actions seemed less than neighborly. Selectman Avery Johnson, tears welling in his eyes, received a silver loving cup and a standing ovation in recognition of the hundreds of hours of his own time he had spent upgrading the municipal computer system. Fifteen minutes later, Philbrick announced the results of earlier balloting, in which Johnson had been voted out of office.

“People here love to be able to stand up and speak their minds and have a handle on how much is spent,” said Philbrick, who has officiated at meetings for the last 11 years. “We’re very traditional.”

The region’s economic boom and unprecedented population growth has led some residents to question whether the traditional is any longer the practical. In the last two years, three of New Hampshire’s 221 towns have voted to replace the annual meeting with a council system similar to that in place throughout most of the country and in larger New England cities.

In Massachusetts, where some towns, like Brookline, have more than 50,000 people, several communities have adopted a hybrid system. Legislative authority is still vested in the annual meeting, but the voters elect a few dozen or a few hundred delegates to represent them at the session.

Others find that annual meetings are not enough nowadays. “We’re simply growing so quickly and the contemporary world is moving so fast that annual legislative business is no longer adequate to deal with the problems of the town,” said Pat Fisk, the outgoing head of the Board of Selectmen in Durham, N.H, which has a population of more than 11,000.

More Authority Delegated

Two years ago, when the Durham Town Hall photocopier broke down, the board had to wait more than four months for the next town meeting to get authority to buy a new one. Such problems prompted Fisk and fellow selectmen to recommend adoption of a council system of government, and at this year’s annual meeting the voters agreed.

“The wheels of government that grind slowly often run well, but there’s a point when you begin to wonder whether they’ll grind at all,” she said.

Although larger communities may be in for a streamlining, few officials think the town meeting will go the way of the town crier or the town social. “I don’t think the town meeting is going to go by the boards in any way, shape or manner,” said John Andrews, executive director of the New Hampshire Municipal Assn.

“It gives us a unique opportunity to impact our government. In the final analysis, it says, ‘I trust myself and my friends and neighbors more than I trust a small group of elected officials.’ ”