I have experienced how special Amherst is among the 351 communities in Massachusetts as a firefighter, as well as serving on the Planning Board, Select Board and many committees.
Each gave a glimpse at the breadth of people who come here to live. We hail from many diverse histories from the first settlers to the most recent tech industry entrepreneur. And as we’ve grown from an agricultural town to university town, the question of how to represent our needs and wishes to the enterprise we call Amherst is as important today as it was 270 or 80 years ago.
The principles of town governance stay the same, and today we have elected friends to consider the most fundamental of those principles, engaging more of our neighbors in actively representing what the town needs.
For a long time Amherst had a system based on feudal English political practices. When Town Meeting was started, it was OK that any, but only, white male land owners were represented in the town’s governance. After great national debate, and with great reluctance on the part of those men, women were also allowed representation.
Now we are experimenting with a form of representative Town Meeting. This version splits the town into 10 geographical precincts each with a different version of the Amherst challenge and each with 24 representatives.
Representative Town Meeting has the important benefit of making it easier for more citizens to get representation into the town’s governance — the most important benefit. Today one doesn’t need to actually get to Town Meeting. Rather, once each year you have only to vote for someone you know will represent you. These representatives, essentially, pledge to do the work of presenting your interests to the town by going to Town Meeting twice a week for several weeks in the spring and again in the fall, at least, to debate the issues and then vote.
As the town progressed, the issues it faced grew more complex, so the representative Town Meeting spun off committees of dedicated hard-working neighbors, the 250 or so who, in their spare time, work to understand the issues and the processes. These town committees augment the state-mandated Finance Committee, Planning Board and Conservation Commission, all of which help Town Meeting have constructive debates and make informed votes.
Now, as voter turnout has been steadily declining, we should be very concerned that our neighbors are not being represented in our town government. Without their vote, whatever the benefits of having 240 members, a “representative” town meeting cannot represent them.
There is some widespread understanding of this problem as many of us voted to go through the arduous process of determining if there is a better way to get us engaged in representing ourselves. I appreciate the good work of the Charter Commission in putting together another system.
The proposal for a council of 13 elected representatives will concentrate the vote and encourage more of us to get heard in our town government. It still requires us to vote once a year for representatives (is that really so hard?) and keeps in place the structures and processes of neighbors working through issues.
An important improvement in knowing how your vote counts is that we can really and more easily pay attention to whom we choose to be our representatives, for our ward and townwide. When it is easy to know if the neighbor we have chosen to represent us gets to meetings, whether they stand up and vote and how they voted, we can be more engaged in our representation.
These will be neighbors we know so our informed vote each year can hold them to transparency in their campaigns, to honesty in their rhetoric and to their making wise decisions. They are also neighbors we can call directly to voice our concerns.
If we are not engaged in voting for our town government, we can be sure the outcome will not represent us. If our system isn’t engaging us as voters, we can be sure that system is not representing us.
I am excited at the prospect of having a proven system of governance and by the prospect that more of my neighbors will be represented as a result.
Only by voting can we be represented. And today our system is not getting the vote. See you at the polls on March 27.
Aaron Hayden, of Amherst, a former chairman of the Select Board and Planning Board, is a Town Meeting member from Precinct 8.