Sarah Holtz interviews Susan Clark, Peter Ashton, Jessamyn West, and Amy Kolb Noyes about Town Meetings.

Susan Clark: A lot of Americans hear the words “town meeting,” and these days a lot of people use the words “town hall meeting,” so they will think of a time when a politician will gather people together and say, “We’re going to talk about healthcare” or have a town meeting on whatever. It basically means that the politician is going to roll up their sleeves and maybe sit on a stool. Other than that, it’s just a meeting where people sound off.

New England town meetings are something very, very different from that. They are actually the legislative branch of the local government. We have a select board that is the executive branch, like the President is the Executive branch and the legislature is the Legislative branch at the national level or at the state level.

At the town level, we have an executive body that meets throughout the year, but the legislative body is anybody who shows up at town meeting who is a voter.

Peter Ashton: The ground rules of town meeting are very important. It’s critically important that we have civil discourse in town meeting. Obviously, these days, that gets harder and harder because people are very opinionated. They’re used to going on their Twitter accounts and saying pretty much whatever they want to.

We don’t allow that at town meeting. Town meetings have a long-storied history backed up by legal cases that say you cannot be critical of other town meeting members. You can be critical about issues. You can say, “I believe this is the right way to do things” or “I believe this is not the right way to do things,” but you are not permitted to say, “Mr. Smith is dead wrong and he should shut up” or something like that. That is strictly not permitted.

Susan Clark: I think I’ve been town moderator about 15 years or so. It’s elected every year. You never know from year to year if you’re going to get reelected, but I think town moderators, if they do a good job, people tend to stick with them.

I’ve really enjoyed it. I see it almost like a convening and hosting job. Other people will say, “It’s part referee, part bar bouncer,” lots of different roles, but I think my main job is to really welcome people into the process.

Peter Ashton: I’m really there to literally moderate the discussion, make sure it stays on a high plane and on topic.

Amy Kolb Noyes: I think one of the most remarkable things about town meetings is how much they don’t change, actually. To be honest with you, town meetings happen in Vermont in early March. We are just starting to break out of winter. For a lot of people, that means that they’ve been cooped up all winter. For some people, it’s hard to get around in the wintertime here, so one of the biggest things about town meetings is the social aspect to it. That never changes.

Susan Clark: Recent years, I’m going to just say, we have worse modeling at the national level, in the media for how to do deliberation or even just how to talk about stuff. We don’t have great models for civility, for active listening, for tolerance and bringing together and co-creating solutions. I find we still have good skills at the local level, but they’re challenged every day by what we hear and see in the media. I think our deliberation can get a little more shrill and more divisive.

The other thing when I say, “media,” I also mean social media because a lot of what we see online is relatively anonymous commenters, people flaming and throwing out their beliefs that they had at eleven o’clock one night when they were ticked off by some meme they saw, which is very different from sitting next to your neighbor, you both serve together on the same fire department or both your kids are on the same soccer team, or whatever it is, and you are disagreeing on something fundamental, that’s a person you’re going to have to look in the eye.

When you leave the meeting and you’re driving home that night and your car skids into a snowbank, who is going to pull you out? Neighbor to neighbor, face to face, what tends to happen is that we maintain some of that old-fashioned civility through those face to face encounters year in and year out, decade in and decade out, and frankly, century in and century out, because these New England town meetings have been going on since before the United States was the United States, and what we see is that New England social capital, those civic skills; tolerance, reciprocity, volunteerism, all those qualities that make abutters into neighbors, all those community qualities are quite strong on places that have a town meeting tradition.

We can’t say cause and effect, but there is good data to show us that there might be a relationship between how we govern ourselves year in and year out and how we live together.

Sarah Holtz: To what degree are the town’s demographics represented at Town Meeting?

Jessamyn West: Well, it’s really interesting because it’s in person. You have to be able to go. Historically, Town Meeting is on a Tuesday. Historically, way back in the day, you’d do your farming in the morning and then everybody would go to Town Meeting or your job. Everybody in town would get the day off to go to Town Meeting, so of course, you’d get as many people as you could. Kids were in school so parents could go, theoretically.

Realistically though, any day you choose for town meeting is going to be inclusive of some people and exclusive of other people. Realistically, our Town Meeting is mostly, not all, old-timers, meaning older people who are retired, civic-minded liberal do-gooders like myself with a flexible schedule. Internet nerd people who can do their internet job at some other time and often whatever the population is where there is a thing coming up.

We have a lot of back and forth drama about our fire districts, so a lot of times, there are also a lot of volunteer fire fighters.
It’s funny because they always sit in the back corner and then me and the knitting liberal do-gooder nerds often sit in the front left corner and then a lot of the older timer retirees sit in the front center so they can hear. All the government people, our selected people, our elected representatives, the town manager, the finance manager, they sit in the front left, but you don’t see the people with jobs, and that’s a problem.

Amy Kolb Noyes: I’ll tell you the story of Hyde Park, which is a town that I used to cover closely for the small, local newspaper. Hyde Park now holds their Town Meeting in an auditorium at the local high school, but back then, back in the day, as they say, they used to hold it in the gym at the elementary school and they’d set up folding chairs all down the gym with an aisle going down the middle.

There were chairs to the left, chairs to the right and then a table in front of the stage where the select board sat or during the school meetings, the school board would sit there. It was completely divided down that middle line.

To one side were all of the people who were born and raised in that town and on the other side were all of the people who had moved in. There was rarely anyone crossing that line. It was the most divided community I had ever seen.

This was a town that was going through a teacher’s strike, leading up to a teacher’s strike, and in the wake of a teacher’s strike, and those political lines were very much reflected in that type of demographic. It was super, super interesting.

It wasn’t until they moved the meeting to the high school with an auditorium set up with no line down the middle that people started sitting next to their neighbors.

Sarah Holtz: Did that deliberation process extend for a long period of time compared to others you’ve seen? How did that play out?

Amy Kolb Noyes: It did tend to be a long meeting. I would say a short meeting in Vermont terms goes until lunch and that one almost always came back after lunch.

Sarah Holtz: Yes, I suppose research on Town Meeting over the past ten or 20 years has shown that there has been a decline in participation and attendance, and I’m wondering if you could talk about that and talk about what has changed attendance, what has changed participation and what you might see for the future.

Susan Clark: Frank Bryan, University of Vermont Political Science Professor did extraordinary research on town meetings across Vermont. Town Meeting is notoriously hard to study because they all happen around the same time. It’s not just gathering numbers. Professor Bryan did send students out and gathered some terrific data over 30 years.

He was able to make some important conclusions in his book Real Democracy. One of them is that town size matters a lot in terms of attendance and participation. The smaller the town in general, the higher per capita participation.

This is a really important finding for us because it tells us about scale and basically an element of human nature that we might not have realized which is that our connection to place matters and our relationship with each other affects our personal political power and our sense of efficacy. People are more likely to participate at scale.

Here in New England, when we ask people to come and sit in a folding chair for four hours and talk about the price of gravel with very little PR, very little hype, it’s just, “Y’all come” kind of thing, we see a lot of people willing to spend a lot of hours.
There is a decline and part of that is people congregating in larger communities where they see their own relationship to power differently. Town size is a big factor.

Are there important issues on the warning? Are we giving people real things to talk about? That’s what gets people. People aren’t going to waste their time talking about nothing.

Sarah Holtz: I also heard that in some places, they’re transitioning to providing an option where if someone from the town can’t attend in person, they can either call in or vote electronically. Have you seen anything like that yet?

Amy Kolb Noyes: I haven’t, no, but it doesn’t surprise me. The big topic every year as Town Meeting comes around is “Is Town Meeting dying?” It doesn’t fit into people’s schedule’s anymore like it used to. We’re not all farmers who don’t have a lot to do in early March. That’s always a big question; “How do we keep Town Meeting viable and relevant?”

Sarah Holtz: What has Town Meeting taught you about conflict resolution?

Peter Ashton: It’s interesting. I think compromise is real important. I think a sense of humor is real important, and I think thinking about the common good is real important. Those are all things that happen at Town Meeting.

The compromise part may actually not happen at Town Meeting. It may happen before in the lead up to Town Meeting. I’ve seen that happen a couple of times.

I actually witnessed in another town compromise occur right on Town Meeting floor, which was pretty extraordinary. There was a dispute over a land issue and the disagreeing parties went off to the side for about ten minutes and they worked a solution up, which is pretty remarkable, frankly.

I think that’s that important part to me of Town Meeting; trying to work through solutions, being able to come up with good ideas that are for the good of the town and making sure that everybody understands that. They may disagree, but they’ve got to live with one another on a day to day basis.

Amy Kolb Noyes: And I think that it speaks to the nature of a small town. These are people that you’re going to fight with on the school budget, you’re going to argue with about how much taxes are going up, and is it worth hiring another guy for the road crew. “My road has potholes all over it, but I don’t want to pay for it.” At the end of the day, in a small town, there is usually a Town Meeting lunch and you’re going to have to sit down together and say, “Pass the beans,” to this person. It’s small town politics.

Susan Clark: People will say, local decision making, yeah, it sounds nice, but there are some arguments against it and one of them is that it’s not very efficient. They’ll say, “It’s just so much faster if we can just make the decisions ourselves and not have to go out and ask people.”

We’re seeing really important data showing us that in fact, the decisions that we make locally are more durable. There’s more buy in, there’s less pushback and it builds trust.

There’s a really flip side to “efficiency.” It can slow you down at the end if you don’t put in the time to engage people in the beginning.

Similarly, a lot of people will say, “These are hard decisions. We need to base them on the experts and not just whoever walks in the door.” The flip side of that of course is that local decision making really draws from local wisdom and local values. Everyone who lives in this community has a story that is unique and that can add to a much more well-rounded decision.
Frances Moore Lappé says experts should be on tap but not on top. I really like that thought that we’re not trying to shut off any expert engagement, but who are the leaders in the democracy? It needs to be we the people. I think that’s an important one.

The idea that it’s easier to manage and easier to administer when we don’t engage people is probably true, but where are our leaders going to come from if not from local training. Local leadership skills are going to make us more effective in emergencies.

We’re seeing more and more things like floods and wildfires and all of these weather-related emergencies. We can’t turn to government to fix these things. We need to help each other.

Vermonters certainly have shown real resilience in these situations of floods and things because we’re used to being leaders. Each individual has their own organizing and leadership skills that they have built on over the decades. I think that there is a need for us going into the future that we’re facing as well.

Jessamyn West: All it is, is run by people. In bigger cities, larger towns, I think a lot of people are really removed from how their government operates, so it’s pretty easy to be like, “Well, it’s us over here just dealing with their policies and them who make the rules.” Realistically, it’s all one system.

Amy Kolb Noyes: It’s hard sometimes to get to a meeting. People have lives. People have jobs. But for the people who do make the effort to go, it’s incredibly rewarding to be in on the ground floor of democracy.

Peter Ashton: Certain people, we have certain people who always get up and speak at Town Meeting. You can usually predict what they’re going to say, but that’s okay. As long as people respect that and respect differing opinions, I think in the end, it actually works out really well.

Susan Clark: People might think that Town Meeting is a relic. They might think that’s this old-fashioned thing and we don’t need that anymore. I think that we need to be careful because local control isn’t really old-fashioned, it’s really in keeping with our post-modern democratic sensibilities.

Our expectations as citizens have dramatically changed since the internet. We are not, as citizens, more likely to look to the leaders, that 1950s command and control model where people say, “Just tell us what to do. You’re the experts.” That’s not us. That’s not us as Americans anymore.

Millennials and anyone who had grown up with the internet, I’ve seen it happen at meetings; an expert will stand up in the front and say something and somebody else will hold up their phone and say, “That’s not just what I found out” and challenge people that way.

A model of governance that is not like a hierarchical top-down process and more like a Wiki where we’re really bringing in the wisdom and energy of people who are interested and engaged and living it is much more in keeping with today’s system and that is what a town meeting is.

For all of its old-fashioned apple pie, flannel shirt imagery that you might have, this is folks coming together to put their best minds together and really make things happen.

It’s a very modern model and it’s being used as a model in deliberative democracy across the world now.

Sarah Holtz: I’d like to ask you kind of a broad strokes question that Frank Bryan poses in his book, which is, “How does Town Meeting contribute to civic capability?”

Susan Clark: Yeah, Great question; “How does Town Meeting help enrich us as citizens?” How does it make us, I think Frank Bryan calls us “small D democrats”?

I think there are a number of ways. One of them is this sense of understanding that we are part of a community and really seeing the impact. When you attend and participate, you can actually feel the thread that you are in that tapestry. You can feel the tugs and see how you’re meshed.

We know from actually really interesting research now in deliberation that people are changed by an empowered deliberation. We see it in jury duty research for example. When I have been involved in a deliberation where I know that my decision is binding, I’m not just giving my advice to some board somewhere, and not just sounding off, we are making binding decisions at the end of our meetings about the budget we want for this year. “Is this the budget we want for this year, yes or no? All those in favor say aye.”

In terms of our democracy today in the United States, many people have argued that it is at risk and they wonder what we can do from the top down to fix it. My argument would be that we need to do this from the bottom up. We need to do this with our neighbors together. This is the root, the oxygen of our democracy; these local decision making processes on things where we can see neighbor to neighbor what impact we play in that democracy.