By Eric Moore — Chair, Town Meeting Study Committee
The Town Meeting Study Committee’s October survey and public forums are a chance for you to have an impact on the direction of Concord’s Town Meeting.
We’re holding an in-person forum on October 22 at the Harvey Wheeler Center and an online Zoom forum on October 29.
The committee page, concordma.gov/TMSurvey, links to the survey and has the forum details. We’re hoping to hear in depth about what our community thinks Town Meeting should and should not be. How would you improve Town Meeting?
Town Meeting is the product of a traditional recipe. The committee is revisiting this recipe for a new generation of voters with different appetites for involvement and diets of attention. What happens if we switch the ingredients around?
Two big questions
Town Meeting is a legislature. We are individuals making decisions together that affect the whole town. Part of the recipe is there by statute. There is some flexibility in how we deliberate, how we decide, and how we participate. We’re trying to make Town Meeting shorter, more efficient, more accessible, and more understandable. Two big questions center on how our community values the main ingredients of Town Meeting: deliberation, and accommodation of difference.
The work of deliberation is talking and listening, with thinking in the middle. Our community is of different minds with respect to group deliberation. Some want to express their views, but don’t necessarily want to listen to the views of others. Is group deliberation valued enough to keep it?
Civility despite differences
How we are with each other at Town Meeting expresses how we are as a community. The ideal of Town Meeting is that we can agree to disagree and that we practice mutual respect and civility in the face of differences. The lived version of Town Meeting may be quite different for some. Can we rely on an expectation of civility, or do we look at solutions that treat self-righteousness simply as a given and change Town Meeting?
What is your individual experience at Town Meeting? How do we make Town Meeting better? Our committee needs your vision to help us do right by our town. Responses from the survey so far show that our community is engaged, thoughtful, diverse, and direct. Please take the survey, attend a forum, or email tmsc@concordma.gov.
