Town Meeting and the School Votes - I

TOWN MEETING AND THE SCHOOL VOTES - I

Many were disappointed with the results of the School votes in Town Meeting in 2016/17 and some were furious.  I count myself among the disappointed, but not furious.  In fact, I count this episode among the many shining moments in Town Meeting’s history.  But let’s review the history before I continue the commentary.

In 2016 the Amherst School Committee, faced with deteriorating elementary school buildings and wishing to eliminate the busing of children to achieve racial and economic integration, proposed a major re-organization of the Amherst elementary schools.  The plan involved closing Fort River School, building a “co-located” pair of grade 2-6 schools for all children on the current Wildwood School site, and repurposing Crocker Farm as an early education center for grades Pre-K through 1.  The plan was bold and raised lots of questions.  Opponents  spoke of wanting to retain neighborhood configurations and the amount of busing and driving this new arrangement would entail.  They described the proposed new building as a “megaschool”.  Proponents emphasized that the new school would provide a fully integrated student body, a more effective concentration of the arts and special services, and a dedicated early learning center where teachers and specialists could work closely together.  I am only scratching the surface of the discussion, which quickly became argumentative and passionate.

In November, 2016, an override referendum to raise property taxes above the statutory limit to support building the new school was narrowly passed,  The Yes votes were 6818, the No votes were 6696.  The override passed with 50.45% of the vote.

Later that month, Town Meeting considered a motion to borrow the money which this taxation would repay over time.  According to state law, motions to borrow money require a 2/3rds vote to prevail.  At this meeting, the motion to borrow could not muster even a simple majority.  The votes were Yes-106, No-108.  The motion was narrowly defeated with just over 50% of Town meeting voting against it.

Dismayed by this result, the School Committee and their supporters successfully petitioned for a reconsideration of the vote, and on January 30, 2017, Town Meeting voted again.  This time the Yes votes were 123 and the No votes were 92.  The Yes vote received  57.2% of the vote,  However, while this was a significant margin, it was less than the 2/3 required by the state for borrowing money.

The proponents of the school proposal made one last effort; they gained enough support to call a town-wide referendum to overturn the Town Meeting vote.  On March 30, 2017, the Town voted 2451 to 2150 to do so.  However, this fell short of the required 2981 votes and the Town Meeting vote stood.  The proposal was defeated and the School Committee went back to the drawing boards to devise an approach to rehabilitating Fort River School.

My own voting record during all of this reflected my deep ambivalence, an ambivalence felt by many voters on both sides of the issue.  I voted Yes on the override referendum.  I voted No on the first borrowing vote in Town Meeting, as did the majority of voting members.  I voted Yes on the second borrowing vote, again with the majority, and finally Yes on the second referendum to overturn the Town Meeting vote.  My ambivalence was due to the proposal, on the one hand, which I thought deficient in many particulars, and, on the other, a strong desire to retire the Wildwood and Fort River buildings which were deficient in so many ways, both educational and physical.  Ultimately I decided that closing the buildings was a higher priority; if the reconfiguration of the schools proved to be a bad idea it could be revised at some later date.

None of this made me happy or confident in my decision but I want to reflect not on the decision nor on the plan itself but upon the role of Town Meeting in this experience and why, even though my final position did not prevail, I am proud of Town Meeting.  I will explain my pride in my next post.

The Charter Debate:  Status Quo

At the debate on January 11, 21018,  Johanna Neumann, the chair of Amherst For All,  the group behind the new charter the Town will soon vote on, contrasted the proposed town council government with the current town meeting/select board government, which she called the status quo. This is a bit like calling America’s national government the status quo because it still has the executive, legislative and judicial branches established in 1789.  In one important way this is right: our governance structure has provided stability in spite of the challenges it has faced (and is facing right now).  But its stability has been based on its flexibility and adaptability.  The history of Amherst’s governance is similar.  The open town meeting of its first almost two hundred years was pretty much the purview of landed white men.  Who were they?  Check the street signs as you drive through town.  (Not Amity Street.}  The representative town meeting established in 1938 was a vast improvement in allowing a wider range of voices and opinions to participate in town governance.

But when I became a Town Meeting Member in 1991, I was dismayed by several aspects. I felt that there were groups in town insufficiently represented in town meeting.  I was unhappy that the votes in town meeting were not transparent, since they were usually voice votes.  When the Finance Committee made a recommendation its focus was too narrow.  When the Planning Board proposed a change in the Zoning By-law, it found it difficult to move beyond the technical language required in the by-law in order to explain it in everyday language.  I was quite critical of Town Meeting.

Two years later I was elected to Amherst’s first Charter Commission as a Town Meeting advocate.  It never occurred to me that my criticisms could not be fixed and it was clear to me that the value of Town Meeting was too great to abandon.  Twenty-five years later many of my concerns have been addressed; Town Meeting is now an accountable body; its membership is more diverse than ever, and it has just established an Advisory Committee to help it understand the benefits and impacts of proposals from the Planning Board and other Boards and Committees.

Our current government, the status quo, balances stability and change.  Most of the time the executive and legislative branches are of one mind and our government is stable, productive  and flexible.  There are, from time to time, great controversies - parking garages, schools, libraries - when the temperature goes up - and this too is part of the status quo.  When the state requires a 2/3 majority vote - mainly on matters of zoning and borrowing - proposals sometimes fail to gain it.  It is not and should not be easy to change zoning or commit the taxpayers to financing debt.  

We should be proud of our status quo.  But taking the long view, it isn’t really the status quo.  The proposed charter is really asking us to revert to the status quo that has typified governments for millenia.  Whether as a council of elders, a municipal council of aldermen, a Board of Overseers, a College of Cardinals or a Sanhedrin, most societies throughout history have delegated their governance to a small group. Sometimes it has worked well and sometimes it hasn’t. This is the status quo that England’s parliament and then America’s slave-owning plantation owners and merchants struggled to reconcile with their strong desire to participate in their own governance.  Over the years that struggle was joined by farmers and workers, women and the descendants of slaves, and countless immigrants who deliberately chose to become Americans.  That struggle goes on; we can be proud of what our Founders achieved but still recognize it remains an imperfect experiment.  It is still our great experiment in democracy and Town Meeting is at its center.  It is important that we keep it.  It is important that we cherish it.

The Charter Debate:  Checks and Balances

I am writing a series of commentaries on the words and ideas at play in the debate about the proposed charter for Amherst.  Opponents of the charter worry that the proposed unicameral government weakens or even eliminates checks and  balances.  Proponents have stated that the new charter embodies and even enhances a set of checks and balances.  But when they talk about checks and balances are they talking about the same thing?

The answer to that question has to start with James Madison.  Our fourth president is rightly described as the father of the United States Constitution.   Madison was distrustful both of monarchy and democracy.  He wanted a strong and large legislature to prevent the executive from following its monarchical instincts, and he wanted a strong executive to counter the populism towards which the legislature might tend.  He wanted a strong federal government to counter the tendency of the agrarian south to separate from the mercantile north, yet he was fundamentally a Virginian who wanted to protect the rights of his state to act in its own best interests.  The history of the United States since 1789 can be seen as a playing out of the unresolved tensions among all these forces.  It is a story of conflict and compromise, as Madison knew it would be.

“If men were angels,”  Madison wrote in Federalist No. 51, “no government would be necessary. . .In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this:  You must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.”  The new government proposed for Amherst does a good job of the first, but is dangerously deficient in the second.

Currently Amherst has a separation of powers somewhat similar to the national and state governments..  It has an executive branch, the Select Board, elected by all the voters in town.  It has a legislative assembly,  Representative Town Meeting, whose members are elected by the voters in ten precincts. (Amherst’s judiciary is outsourced to the Massachusetts Attorney General, as prescribed by Massachusetts General Laws.)

Like federal and state executives, the Select Board has great but not final powers. It creates and proposes the town budget.  It maintains and proposes amendments to the Zoning Bylaw.  (Such amendments are usually offered by the Planning Board, which is appointed by the Town Manager who reports to the Select Board.)  It shapes and often writes or edits the Articles on the Town Warrant, and shapes the Warrant itself.  It has the power to convene Town Meeting upon citizen petition or whenever it deems it necessary.  (The Select Board also has a myriad other authorities and powers not germane to the issue of checks and balances.) At Town Meeting sessions, the Town Moderator traditionally shows deference to Select Board members when they ask to be recognized.

Town Meeting can act only on Articles brought to it by citizen petition or by the Boards and Committees that comprise the executive.  But, except under certain circumstances, its votes on Articles are definitive and final.  Town Meeting as a body cannot initiate the placement of Articles on the Town Warrant (although members have the same right as other voters to petition for an Article to be presented to Town Meeting).

There is a further illustration of checks and balances within Town Meeting itself, and it is truly Madisonian.  Town Meeting is a cauldron of interests, sometimes in conflict, sometimes not.  These interests have to do with zoning changes, property rights, public services and much else.  Madison referred to such conflicting interests as factions and wrote in Federalist Paper #10 that the virtue of a large republic over a small one is that no particular faction is likely to predominate.

What Madison feared above all, even more than the tyranny of a monarchy, was the tyranny of a majority.  He would approve Amherst’s large Town Meeting, and find nothing remarkable in the sometimes strained relationship between the Boards and Committees, on the one hand, and Town Meeting, on the other.  That would indicate that checks and balances were working pretty well.  

Now that we have seen what the commission has come up with - a unicameral body that is neither executive nor legislative (but partakes of both) - we can better appreciate the separation of powers and the checks and balances we currently have.  Under the charter proposal, 7 people  can determine the fate of most motions and 9 people can decide to change the zoning bylaw or raise taxes by borrowing money after a simple majority of voters has approved an override of taxation limits.  

We can hope that councillors are honorable people dedicated to serving the public interest and will not be swayed by the interests of their sponsors or voters, but we have to acknowledge that councillors may not be angels.   Angelic or not, 7 or 9 of them can run Amherst.  The Charter Commission’s assurance that they might get their comeuppance at the next election will not undo any decisions or change any statutes. 

If checks and balances are working the parts of government can and do get annoyed and frustrated with one another.  But if they are not working the government can slip into chaos or authoritarianism.  It is the Charter Commission’s idea that the appointed Town Manager is the executive branch of our government, while the Town Council is the legislative.  This might have been true had the new charter specified a considerable term of office for the Town Manager, say 7 years.  This would have contributed to a sufficient separation from the Council to quality as an independent branch of government.  But there is no such specification in the proposed Charter.  The Council may remove or suspend the Town Manager, with or without cause, at any time.  There are provisions in the Charter for hearings, but none for appeal.  This significant deficiency makes the Town Manager, in spite of her/his significant powers of appointment and oversight, a creature of the Council.

I urge Amherst voters to read or re-read Federalist 51.  Decide whether your annoyance with our government from time to time overrides the checks and balances which create it.  If you want to examine the current relationship between the Select Board and Town Meeting with the hope of strengthening the checks and balances that currently exist, I will be glad to join you.

The Charter Debate: Accountability

Accountability

I want to reflect on some of the words and ideas being used in the current debate about the Charter proposal Amherst will vote on at the end of March.  I say “words and ideas” because I think they are separate things; some of the words used do not clearly represent ideas, and some of the ideas are not represented by words.  I am a strong advocate for defeating the Charter proposal, and over the next few months will try to explain why.  

“Accountability” is a word that Charter proponents love to use.  It leads everywhere and nowhere.  It is a heavy word with a certain ominous ring to it.  It is intended to be a Good Thing but in debate it is wielded like a weapon.  But what can it possibly mean?

Political accountability lies in the public nature of votes and positions on substantive issues.  In Amherst, all sessions of Town Meeting are broadcast live on television.   The votes of all Town Meeting Members on most substantive issues are available on the Town of Amherst website.  Everyone can see how their precinct members voted.  They can also see how regularly their members attended town meeting sessions.  Presumably, if Amherst votes for a Council it too will be accountable.  There will not be any difference between the two.  

Some years ago, it was valid to criticize Town Meeting for a lack of accountability.  Most votes were voice votes, and tally votes were time-consuming and used only on the request of fifteen town meeting members.  The is why I and many others pushed for the electronic voting that now renders that criticism moot.  There is not the slightest difference in accountability between town meeting and the proposed town council.

But there is a confusion in the minds of pro-charter enthusiasts between being accountable and being held accountable.  The second, with its Calvinistic overtones, sees elections as the mechanisms by which voters render judgment on incumbents.  Sometimes, admittedly, this is how voters view it.  But more often the connection between elections and accountability is loose at best.  Most often elections are expression of preference rather than judgement.  In some elections no incumbents run; in other elections (like the recent city election in Northampton) incumbents run unopposed.  Voters vote for candidates they like, candidates they know, candidates they have heard about, and, sometimes, candidates they agree with.  They may vote for candidates because of their positions on issues, but just as often because they admire their integrity and trust their judgment.  This is true for town meeting members and might be true for town councillors.  And if, as is often the case, they vote against an incumbent, they can still admire her integrity and judgment.

Pro-charter voices have also attempted to connect accountability to the scheduling of elections.  Under the proposed charter, voters would vote for five councillors every two years (two from districts and three at-large).  Under the current governance, voters vote for at least eight members every year (or sixteen every two years).  If this kind of arithmetic is appealing to you, perhaps you can parse it to distinguish between the accountability of town meeting and that of town council.  I can’t.

But being held accoutable isn’t a political idea. Maybe it is more managerial , with its roots in the history of bureaucratic organization.  There is something deadening about bureaucracy; everybody is in charge of someone else and also accountable to someone else.  You have your job to do, and periodically you are told how well you have done it.  Like schools, bureaucracies act as though you don’t know how well you have done until a supervisor tells you.  This saps individuals of initiative and responsibility.  Instead of being accountable, one is “held” accountable by someone who has the power either to endorse your performance or terminate your employment.  Politicians who worry about being held accountable tend to subordinate their best judgment to the polls, the twitter feeds, the emails to their offices.  We have seen so much of this on the national level that I cannot believe we would want to see it locally.

Maybe iaccountability is essentially an ethical issue.  What are the ethical implications of acting on behalf of voters who cannot vote on issues?  Do they require acting on behalf of the majority of voters or all the voters?  Do they require councillors or members to subordinate their best judgment to a sense of what the voters want?  How are they to know what the voters want?  Is accountability bending to the will of others and if so, which others?  Perhaps this is the pertinent question for voters at an election: accountable to whom?

And perhaps that is the fundamental issue with accountability:  accountable to whom?  Accountability has deep roots in ethics, religion and philosophy.  The ultimate question is “how should I live my life.” Some locate the answer in some outer authority, while others find it in introspection and reflection.  Similarly, some find accountability in submission to the judgment of others.  Some prefer to speak of responsibility, of holding oneself to the highest personal standards and submitting to one’s own best judgment.  Charter proponents don’t seem to think in these terms but perhaps they should.