[H]UNTINGTON — On Tuesday morning, dozens of cars lined the dirt road leading to the Brewster Pierce Elementary School where, inside, residents were debating the town’s proposed school budget.
On the sidelines of the school gym, where Huntington’s traditional Town Meeting and budget votes were held, students from the University of Vermont scribbled on notepads and worksheets.
They kept track of how many town residents attended and who was talking. They noted how long particular proposals were up for discussion.
Their research was part of tradition stretching back a half a century where UVM students have cataloged data about Town Meeting Day participation in an effort to gauge how democratic the process really is.
The research ritual started under retired UVM political science professor Frank Bryan, who developed a “democratic index” for town meetings that measures turnout and participation rates. Bryan began the research in 1969.
Forty UVM students fanned out across the state to collect data at meetings in 16 different towns.
Their research found — as it typically does — that smaller Vermont towns have the highest rate of attendance and participation on Town Meeting Day, and thus a higher democratic index.
“Small towns clearly are still valuing town meeting. People are attending, people are participating, and larger towns less so,” said Richard Watts, a University of Vermont professor and director of the Center for Research on Vermont, who now oversees the research.
“It’s partly that in a larger town, you feel less engaged with the specific issues before the town,” Watts said.
In some larger towns, it has also become customary to vote proposals by Australian ballot, opposed to voting from the floor in an open meeting forum.
The largest town where UVM students tracked Town Meeting Day activities was Williston, which votes most of its proposals by ballot at the polls on Tuesday.
It received the worst score on the democratic index, only seeing a peak attendance of 87 registered voters, in a town with 9,300. During the informational meeting Monday night, which only lasted 30 minutes, students measured attendance on the room on several occasions, and found its highest at 87 residents.
The town with the highest democratic index was Belvidere, a municipality made up of only 412 people, which saw a peak attendance of 31 voters, or about 13.5 percent of those registered. At the meeting, held Tuesday, about 80 percent of them weighed in publicly on measures proposed before the town — the highest of any of the surveyed municipalities, by a landslide.
In conducting research, students noted other trends about town meeting participation, including gender dynamics. While the researchers have yet to analyze this year’s gender participation data, it generally shows that women tended to speak at the meetings in far fewer numbers than men.
Watts stressed the importance of continuing to track Town Meeting Day trends, and carrying on the work of Bryan, who retired in 2013. For five years the research stopped, until Watts and others revived it last year.
“It is this pure form of direct democracy. There’s very little like this in the world,” Watts said.
“This group here could decide to zero out the town budget. Or they could double the budget. They could do everything right here,” he said, referring to the group of Huntington voters.
At the daytime traditional meeting in Huntington, UVM students said they admired how the group meeting format allowed residents to directly weigh in on the issues.
Around 10 a.m., the hot topic of discussion in the school budget was a proposal to replace the gym floor, which was visibly scuffed and worn.
“It’s good to see people passionate about something and they’re coming out … just to talk about issues,” said Alura Thiem, a UVM freshman from Bennington. “Even if it’s something that seems kind of small like a gym floor, it’s important to them.”
James Simpson, a UVM senior from Shelton, Connecticut, said he wished his hometown held a town meeting.
“You have as much power as anybody else in the room to change what you don’t like instead of just showing up with the ballot and saying yes or no on something,” he said.
Will Hanley, a UVM senior from Castleton, said he felt like town meeting was an ideal format for a small state Vermont. But he could see similar processes in larger states “break down,” if too many people got involved.
“It’s a very unique form of democracy that would only work in a place like Vermont,” he said.
UVM students weren’t the only visitors in Huntington on Tuesday. Vermont’s town meetings are known for drawing observers from all over the country, even other nations.
Nathan McDonnell, a 27-year-old Montreal resident, drove down with 21 fellow Canadians to attend town meetings across the state.
At the elementary school in Huntington, he said the group was interested in bringing elements of the town meeting process back to their city neighborhood. He particularly admired how town meeting opens up municipal finances to public view and control, and allows ordinary people to have a front-row seat in local decision-making.
“It’s not just a public consultation,” he said. “The public has complete power.”
