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.