Vermont town meetings grapple with contentious debate on big issues : NPR
Tuesday is town meeting day in Vermont. Municipalities in New England and beyond are increasingly grappling with major national and international issues at the local level.
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JOSEPH PREZIOSO/Getty Images
If you haven’t lived in some New England towns, it can be difficult to understand their centuries-old style of direct democracy. Municipal meetingswhere ordinary residents vote on mundane municipal matters such as funding for schools, snow plows and road repairs.
These days, voters are also being asked to speak out on domestic and international issues, such as demanding the defunding of ICE and condemning the “unprovoked attack and start of an illegal and immoral war against Iran.” All of this fuels a distinct – and fierce – debate about what cities should be debating.
“When people slide into authoritarian rule, it’s up to us to sound the alarm,” insists Dan Dewalt, an activist in Newfane, Vermont, one of several communities where residents rushed to draft a resolution against the war in Iran in time for their annual town meeting on Tuesday.
Local resolutions are a particularly effective tactic, activists and experts say, and they are increasingly used in New England and beyond, especially as national politics has become highly polarized.
“People feel isolated and helpless and hopeless. And when you hear about other people who are like you who are taking a stand and representing something that you believe in, it not only gives you hope, but also power,” Dewalt said.
Several other Vermont towns will consider resolutions Tuesday calling for impeachment of the president and vice president “for crimes against the US Constitution”, while many others will vote on the commitment to “end all support for Israel’s policies of apartheid, settler colonialism, military occupation and aggression”.
A similar divestment resolution passed by 46 votes to 15 in Newfane. last year, after hours of heated discussions about the plight of the Palestinians, the safety of Israelis, the “inflammatory” language of the resolution — and whether such issues, halfway around the world, even belong on the agenda of the small town of about 1,650 people.
“It’s a town meeting for city problems,” Newfane resident Walter Hagadorn told a recent select committee meetingwhere residents pressed board members to block any future resolutions not directly related to city business.
“You should not be subjected to hours and hours of virtue signaling” and trying to “hijack Town Meeting,” Hagadorn said.
Others agreed, suggesting activists hold a debate about their issues at another time and place, or hold a rally or protest instead.
But Select Board member Katy Johnson-Aplin pushed back, saying it wouldn’t have the same impact.
“It doesn’t work the same way,” Johnson-Aplin said. Only when the issue is formally addressed at a Town Meeting that “this is published in the newspaper and it is recorded that the Town of Newfane has agreed to have this conversation.”
Daniel Hopkins, a political science professor at the University of Pennsylvania, has observed the growing movement of local communities taking stands on issues far beyond city limits.
“It’s a trend that we’re seeing increasingly across all 50 states and in a variety of ways, but I think it’s taken a new and potentially more concerning turn,” Hopkins said. “I worry that we are in an attention-grabbing, sensationalizing media environment, in which the types of issues that engage us nationally can further polarize states and localities and make it more difficult for them to build meaningful coalitions on other issues.”
Indeed, in Newfane, the resolution regarding Israel has become so controversial that some residents decided not to even come to last year’s town meeting, according to board vice president Marion Dowling.
In Burlington, where a similar resolution was proposed, City Council President Ben Traverse said things were so heated that he and his family were receiving harassing phone calls and even death threats. Burlington city councilors voted in January to prevent the issue from going to a popular vote. Vermont has a history of resolutions on “big issues,” from the push for a Nuclear Weapon Freeze in the 1980s, to calls to ban genetically modified foods in 2003. Dewalt, the Newfane activist, was behind several of these, including calls to impeach then-President George W. Bush in 2006, leading to him being invited to speak on network television shows and quoted in The New York Times.
“I can guarantee you that if I stood up on my soapbox and made a statement in exactly the same terms, no one would ask me about it,” he said. “We are not here about the power of our Newfane town meetings, but our actions have always had an impact.”
But opponents say activists overestimate the impact of their resolutions and victory. They say it is disingenuous, for example, to claim that the town of Newfane supported the resolution against Israel, when the winning majority of 46 people represented less than 3 percent of the town’s residents.
“I feel like they’re using the town as a vehicle for their personal messages and that bothers me,” said Newfane resident Cris White. “It’s so middle school.”
Traverse, the Burlington City Council president, also takes issue with what he calls the resolution’s “inflammatory” language.
“The issue, as presented, addresses this issue in a one-sided, forward-thinking way,” Traverse says.
In Vermont, any registered voter can get a resolution on the town meeting agenda by collecting the signatures of 5% of voters in their town. Although city officials have the authority to authorize or block the resolution, there is no process in place to review or change the language.
Traverse says it would be up to city leaders and voters to demand a formal review to ensure the language is fair and neutral, just as many states do with election issues. Traverse says he’s not opposed to putting controversial and important resolutions before local voters, but the language needs to be clear and even-handed.
