Town Meeting Day: Participatory Democracy the Vermont Way
That’s right. I’m talking about Vermont’s tradition of Town Meeting Day, always held on the first Tuesday in March regardless of the weather, the current political landscape, and often despite age. In Vermont, you are almost as apt to find toddlers and teens learning about democracy “maple” style as you will octogenarians and older.
If you’re thinking of a voting day where people race into an electronic voting booth and dash back out, you have not visited Vermont. First, even in national elections, the Green Mountains state still largely casts Australian ballot. This means we vote by paper and pencil for those of you in the land of hanging, dimpled, and pregnant chads and electronic machines that register more votes than the number of people who cast ballots.
But on Town Meeting Day, the voting gets personal and very much human. A raised voice or hand shows your position, yea or nay. The vote usually comes only after people discuss, suggest, amend, and sigh for a bit.
If you don’t like a single item in the town budget projected for the coming year, don’t worry. You’ll get a chance to discuss it, sometimes even for far longer than you would like. If you don’t understand the program or service behind a budget item, you’re free to ask for an explanation. If you think the amount listed is either too much or too little, you can jump into the fray and try to get enough interest to get the line item changed.
Town Meeting Day is rarely a short affair. People come to them prepared to sit for a good part of the day. In fact, in many towns, you’re encouraged to slip quickly home for lunch or to buy lunch right there in whatever town hall, fire station, or school where you gather. With the great cooks and even better organic fare up here, some of these meeting day lunches – and a few offer breakfast, too – are gourmet quality on a beer budget.
My first town meeting day was quite an eye opener. I came from another state in New England where we always had a town meeting once a year, too. But it was not the tradition, the social event, the school lesson, and serious dollar-by-dollar budget blow-by-blow, and the consciousness raising of Town Meeting Day Vermont style.
Nor was Town Meeting Day elsewhere true participatory democracy at its finest as it mostly seems exercised in the land of Ethan Allen, the Green Mountain Boys, and a history steeped in a time when Vermont was anything but another state in the Union. In fact, this year, there is some conversation going around about whether this year’s Town Meeting Day in various places may feature talk of seceding back out of the United States.
Yes, on Town Meeting Day, the talk isn’t just budget. In recent years, janitors and doctors, yoga teachers and some on the staff at the big military school called Norwich University, come together with lawyers, ditch diggers, and both retired folks and kids to discuss whether genetically modified seeds should be prohibited, whether every meeting should begin with the Pledge of Allegiance, and even whether to tell the president that we want our troops to come home from Iraq and Afghanistan.
Sure, these votes, when passed, are usually in the form of non-binding resolutions. Yet the process sends a message out to the rest of the state, country and world, while it teaches valuable group dynamics and democracy here at home. We also get the opportunity to see our old neighbors and meet new ones, ask questions about school programs, and figure out why last year’s fuel budget was so far off kilter.
Of course, you don’t have to live in Vermont to start your own Town Meeting Day. You might actually already have something like it on the books in your community but no one besides old-time residents remember anything about it. Not every community leader may like to call attention to a public-speakout day and may not go wildly out of his or her way to advertise the opportunity. That job, at least in a participatory democracy, may fall to you, one of the people.
