Has Town Meeting run its course?

(May 16, 2024) It was long, often contentious, and after 15 hours over three nights, at the end of Nantucket’s Annual Town Meeting last week, it begged the question if Nantucket has outgrown its long-standing form of governance.

“We’re asking too much of the people, the problems of the town have become too complex for a volunteer method of governance,” outgoing health director Roberto Santamaria said.

Santamaria was a co-sponsor of Curtis Barnes’ article last year which established a committee to look into a town council form of government. That group has been meeting since last fall.

There were issues with attendance. At the start there were so many people it created overflow issues; at the end there were less than 250 to represent the entire voting body of the island, more than 9,000 registered voters. And the demographic has for years been skewed toward those who are able to commit to the lengthy and arduous process.

Town Moderator Sarah Alger said given her position she didn’t have a direct opinion on what type of governance the town should use. But she did note that at the end of the day, the decisions made at Town Meetings have been prudent.

“I know it’s long, sometimes boring and repetitive, but at the end of the day, the decisions that people come up with are really good,” she said. “I think 95 percent of all articles were passed in one form or another. And there were good reasons for the ones that didn’t pass.”

Select Board member Dawn Holdgate, when discussing a possible change to representative government, said that it will, in essence, further remove people from the direct democratic process.

“If you’re critical or don’t have faith in the decision five (Select Board) people are making, are you really going to feel better if there are nine of us?” she said.

With a warrant spanning more than 100 articles, Beau Barber, one of the members of the Town Council Study Committee, said it’s unrealistic to expect people to be knowledgeable about all the topics they are voting on.

“Even an intelligent person cannot go through all the issues,” he said. “Doing this all in one shot means that you’re going to have to sit down and study for a month to be a fully intelligent voter who is going to make good decisions. And who can really do that?”

That is on top of spending 15 hours over three nights to physically be present to vote.

What happens, Barber said, is that the legislative arm of the government, in this case the Town Meeting voters, are forced to rely on the executive branch, the Select Board, creating an imbalance of power.

“You’re not on a level playing field. I saw town counsel answering a lot of the requests for information to say what can and can’t be done,” he said. “Town counsel does not represent the voters, he represents the executive branch. And he’s advising the voters at Town Meeting. Your legislative branch needs to be as powerful as the executive, and the two of them need to work out how they’re going to enact and carry out bylaws.”

Then there is the issue of attendance. With a hot-button topic like short-term rentals on the agenda, more than 1,500 voters packed the high school at the start of Town Meeting. That number, even though it represents just over 10 percent of the voting public, was too large to accommodate. It created the need for overflow spaces including in the gymnasium, where people watched a video feed of the meeting happening next door on a live feed with a slight delay.

A number of people in the gym said they were confused when they voted on Article 59, the major STR zoning bylaw. Some said they thought they were voting on a language change instead of the article itself. That message didn’t get relayed to Alger until it was too late.

Brian Borgeson, who was in the gymnasium, said the remoteness added to the confusion.

“We all know remote learning sucks. Well remote voting sucks, too,” the charter fishing captain said. “Town Meeting was set up when there were 400 of us here, there were 1,400 people in three different rooms trying to figure out what we were voting on.”

Alger said there are already discussions to ensure there are more direct lines of communication between rooms so that what happened on Tuesday night won’t happen again.

After the vote on short-term rentals, hundreds left Town Meeting. In the final hours of the third day, there were less than 200 people voting on issues that would affect the entire island. The length of Town Meeting is one that many in the community cannot commit to, leaving a skewed representation of the voting public.

“By the time Town Meeting was over, we had less than 200 people. That’s crazy, that’s an unacceptable form of democracy,” Santamaria said.