By GLYNIS HART
I used to work at a group of community weeklies, where one day an outraged reader called the office to ask me a question.
She’d been mulching her tomatoes with the newspaper, she said, and while doing so she started to read it. The story was a description of a municipal board meeting where that political body had devolved into bitter factions, with the majority faction (led by the town supervisor) running roughshod over the town clerk (an elected position in New York) and the oldest and most sensible member of the board.
“How long,” she demanded to know, “has this been going on?”
A while, I assured her. I’d been writing about it for months.
The next meeting, this reader and a few of her neighbors showed up. The meeting after, a few more. By election time the townspeople were mighty annoyed at how the town board was conducting itself, and they ended up tossing the supervisor out with a write-in campaign of nearly 500 votes for her opponent.
Democracy is a powerful thing.
However, like all powerful things, it’s got its odd blossoms, and in the audience of many a municipal meeting are gadflies, naysayers, and well-meaning but ill-informed citizens. As a reporter, my personal peeve is people who go to public meetings and complain that they don’t know what their elected representativ es are doing — especially when the newspaper has been doing its job and telling the world exactly that.
Then there are colorful characters: a guy who stood up during the city council meeting in Schenectady and lobbed a football at the council, shouting, “Get on the ball!” at the mayor. Or an informed but intellectually challenged woman whom everyone in town knew by her first name, who declaimed on every progressive issue that came before the Ithaca city government. Sure, such folks might be irritating, even disruptive, but their right to be there and speak their minds is sacred. City councils, school boards and other elected groups always have some tension between getting their work done and hearing public comment.
Generally, elected boards are not required to answer public comments during meetings, which helps move things along.
Different government bodies have different rules on how to handle the public — I don’t think throwing footballs would be tolerated nowadays — including limiting the minutes one person can speak or setting up “working meetings” where there is no public comment session.
Claremont City Council has been kicking around the idea of arranging the order of the agenda so the public who show up to speak to an issue don’t have to stay until after nine o’clock. The public comment session in the beginning of the city council meeting (around 6:40 p.m.) is specifically for items not on the agenda. If the public wishes to speak about an item on the agenda, it must wait until that item comes up in the course of the meeting.
In light of the council’s earnest discussions about how to work in as much public comment as possible, the last species of public commenters — naysayers — is especially irritating.
These are folks who seem to show up for the sole purpose of telling the board what a lousy job it’s doing. Whether it’s the school board, city council, select board, you name it, the naysayer treats all elected officials as if they’re fat cats ripping off the taxpayer and stuffing dollar bills in their pockets.
In New Hampshire this is patently absurd. The stipend our delegates receive isn’t enough to cover the cost of gas for one week of traveling to Concord from Claremont. City councilors and school board members serve without pay.
Recent commenters at the city council meeting blamed it for Claremont’s 40 years of decline, which it shares with many similar towns in the Northeast (see Schenectady, above) and called Claremont’s a “dump” adding “nobody wants to move here.”
Watching the council’s faces I saw a look I’ve seen many times in public meetings before. I don’t know how to describe it: the person speaking is just complaining, or even verbally abusing the elected folks, but they always sit there and listen with a mix of suppressed irritation and resolve. I swear I can hear at least one person thinking, as Voltaire supposedly did: “I disapprove of what you say, but I’ll defend to the death your right to say it.”
Amazing.
Glynis Hart is the New Hampshire reporter for the Eagle Times.
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