The town of Temple continues the debate between ballot voting and traditional Town Meeting again this year.
“My feeling, boils down to the easiest way to vote is better,” said Brian Kullgren, who wrote the petition to get the issue on the ballot.
Kullgren said there is typically several hundred more people who turn out to the polls each year than go to the annual Town Meeting. Allowing that wider population to have their say on town issues is a benefit of ballot voting, he said.
For more than a decade, the town has voted on the same issue, – always been a petition article brought forth by Kullgren – of whether to adopt ballot voting for all town issues, called SB2, for the Senate bill that outlined the process. The proposal has varied in popularity from year to year, sometimes getting a majority vote, but never quite making it to the three-fifths majority it needs to pass.
Under a Town Meeting model, which Temple currently operates under, the town holds a budget hearing on the monetary warrants, votes at the ballot boxes for town officials and items required by law. But the majority of votes take place in person at Town Meeting. During Town Meeting, residents can make changes on the floor to any warrant article, increasing or decreasing monetary amounts.
Under SB2, following the budget hearing, the town must hold a deliberative session. It is during the deliberative session that voters can debate articles and amend them. Then, all articles receive their final vote at the ballot box.
Peter von Sneidern of Temple said he backs the Town Meeting model. Towns which have adopted the SB2 model have historically had low turn-out to the deliberative session, where articles can be amended. That means a small section of the population can change an article the whole town will vote on.
“That’s the flaw of it,” he said.
Also, he said, because there’s low attendance at deliberative sessions, voters aren’t as informed about the impact of the articles when they vote.
“There are more voters, but less informed,” von Sneidern said of the SB2 system.
However, proponents of SB2 argue the opposite. The deliberative session is designed to allow residents to come together well before the final vote, hear the arguments, go home and do any additional research or get questions answered.
“You have 30 days to research and read the papers and get informed,” Kullgren said. “At Town Meeting it’s usually a knee-jerk reaction voting, and I don’t think that’s a good idea when we have an alternative.”
Selectman Ken Caisse said Wednesday that he supports SB2, because Town Meeting doesn’t offer an alternative for people who are unable to attend Town Meeting. There is no absentee ballot in the Town Meeting format – only voters who are physically present may vote.
“We have military families, we have people that are disabled, people that can’t show up that Saturday,” Caisse said. “There’s benefits to Town Meeting and downfalls to SB2, but we get more people who are able to vote.”
Von Sneidern said he likes to be able to hear the feedback from a room full of people at Town Meeting.
“You get a room with 250 people rubbing against a problem, you’re going to get more ideas,” he said. “Nobody is turned away from Town Meeting. I don’t think three hours once a year is that big of a commitment to make.”
The town will hold a public hearing on the petition article to adopt SB2 at the Town Hall meeting room on Tuesday. The article will appear on the ballot on March 12 and requires a three-fifths majority to pass.
Ashley Saari can be reached at 924-7172 ext. 244 or asaari@ledgertranscript.com. She’s on Twitter @AshleySaariMLT.