Opinion: The granular nature of democracy and trying to cover it well

The Eagle Times has been returning to its coverage area to visit select boards, businesses, and attractive natural places, but their reporter in Springfield has decided to retire.

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By BILL CHAISSON
Jan 16, 2019
The Eagle Times has been returning to its coverage area to visit select boards, businesses, and attractive natural places. When one of our reporters shows up in one of these town halls for a meeting, some select boards are a bit baffled. “We haven’t seen a reporter for years,” they say.

We don’t have a big staff: two reporters, one for New Hampshire and one for Vermont. Our part-time freelance reporter in Springfield has decided to retire. We have various other freelance writers, but many of them write arts articles or columns. It is pretty hard to convince someone to sit through a two-hour select board meeting where the hot topic is whether or not to spend money on repairing a sewer main. Not to many people are equipped to follow the fine points of conduit materials, state matching grants, and the merits of the machinery owned by one contractor versus another. A lot of would-be reporters are former English majors and don’t even change their own oil in their car.

I don’t change my own oil either, but after you go to enough select board meetings, it’s remarkable what you can learn about excavation equipment. In the end, the nuts and bolts of running a small town or city is just plain fascinating. Why? Because democracy is so messy and yet it has been working pretty well for over 250 years now (I’m counting colonial governments).

In these towns that have between 1,500 and 13,000 people in them, the elected officials are all nearly volunteers (school board members are volunteers) and yet they devote hours of time each month to making decisions about the running of their towns.

Reporters, especially middle-aged ones who have been covering local government for years, do get a bit impatient with some board members who have forgotten Robert’s Rules of Order, have really not done their homework on a particular issue, or who are obviously making decisions based on their politics rather than the facts in front of them.

Towns can definitely get “in the weeds” and it is a shame when the county or the state sweeps in with an audit and finds lax bookkeeping or misuse of funds. In my experience the latter most often occurs because elected officials simply didn’t “read the instructions on the box,” as it were. They got some money from somewhere and didn’t know about the strings attached.

In any case, the voters nearly always figure out they have a better alternative and clean house at the next election. Good old democracy.

A lot of small towns have a hard time finding candidates for both elected positions and for appointed ones. Even in the city of Claremont, with a population of about 13,000, they have vacancies on several city commissions and boards. Imagine how difficult it is to fill these seats in a town of 3,000 people.

Although in New England the towns are regarded (by themselves) as something like sovereign entities, they actually are subject to state laws, including statutes that describe how money should be used for nearly every purpose (cemeteries, open air movie theatres, you name it).

In upstate New York, where I lived for 25 years, small town governments became increasing frustrated with the growing presence of the state in their towns. One town put off mandatory addition of storm runoff legislation because it was so expensive to hire professional to write it for them. It was only when the threatened fines were larger than the costs of hiring the engineer that they caved in.

Small towns have changed a lot since the end of World War II. The spread of automobile use and the improvement of local roads meant that people could commute to nearby cities for work and do more of their shopping there too.

Bedroom communities are odd places where people do little more than reside. They don’t work there and they don’t shop there. Sometimes they don’t even send their kids to school or go to church in the town where they live. In the absence of these multiple socio-economic connections a resident’s relationship with their town becomes more abstract and in some cases is simply diminished compared to an earlier era.

Part of my fascination with covering small towns is perhaps because I don’t really have a hometown. I was born in Massachusetts, lived briefly in South Carolina and then grew up in three different parts of New York state. I have since lived in Maine, Massachusetts, more different parts of New York, and California. Of the 50 states there are only four I haven’t visited. There are small towns everywhere and I love seeing how they are run.

Bill Chaisson is the editor of the Eagle Times and by nature a city dweller.