What happened at Town Meeting?

[Town Clerk: Benjamin Heisholt is looking over his notes]

         It can be debated whether Town Meeting day is an antiquated form of government. But in Vermont, town meeting day is still a stronghold for direct democracy. An example of this democracy in action was at the Barnet town meeting.

The atmosphere was bright and conversational as the residents of Barnet gathered into the school gym for their annual town meeting. The Selectboard took their places on the stage and residents with their town warning and annual reports sat in their seats waiting for the meeting to start.

The school’s kitchen filled the air with food as the cooks were preparing for lunch. The meeting began at eleven a.m. and Theodore Faris, Chair of the selectboard addressed the issues on the warning. Many of the action items had to deal with approving appropriation of money to various services and elections for a moderator and town officials. The Lake Harvey Association was a group among the crowd that was asking the town of Barnet to appropriate a sum of $10,000 to use for a boat wash program (Article 11). The purpose of this program, according to Jan Sherman president of the Association was to prevent milfoil and other invasive species at Harvey’s lake. The lake is one of the town’s major water resources and to protect it is important to the community. The voters approved the article with the old fashion yay or nay vote. The town used the Australian ballot to vote on the waste district budget. The results were 101 votes in favor of the budget and 15 votes against.

The town meeting operated smoothly and residents were attentive and questioned any articles that they did not understand. For the most part the meeting went by in a timely fashion. But it was at the school district meeting where many concerns were raised.

The issue was deciding whether to transfer $70,000 from the school fund reserved for tuition to the 2011 fiscal year budget. Shannon Larocque a school board director, said it was because the money that was reserved for high school tuition had not been used in the last years. The board requested it to be allocated in the school budget. The voters approved the allocation but even with the transfer of money the expenditure budget was still down compared to last year. The voters were concerned programs were going to be cut because of this slight deficit. The expenditure budget right now is above 4.2 million dollars. Larocque said that they were cutting three positions, but assured the residents that they were cutting the bare minimum. Both the school and the town boards were cooperative and listened to any of the concerns of the people. When the town meeting adjourned for lunch the room was loud again. Looking around the room anyone could see that these local people care about their town and how it is governed.