Finance Articles for Town Meeting This Week

Usually I look forward to Town Meeting. I've been a TM member for almost nine years, and some sessions are more compelling than others. This year not so much.

The first two nights of TM this year were just bad. I can't point to a single cause. Things seemed disorganized, especially with the Town Administrator fumbling through PowerPoint slides and through his folder of deleted email for a draft of something. (Yeah, this was on the big screen, in front of TM. Geez.) Others could not quite find the right draft of proposed amendments to articles. With the CPA article, we saw the Warrant Committee trying to micromanage things too much. Been there, heard that before. I even found myself apologizing to a new TM member for how bad it was (and I overheard someone else doing the same - "honest, it's never this bad.") At least the moderator (Mike Widmer) did a good job running with what he had available.

From many members, both this year so far and during last fall's Town Meeting, I did get more than the usual vibe of distrust in town officials. I don't know whether it's distrust of the particular Belmont officials, or just the national tea party mentality trickling on us in Belmont.

We'll see how it goes. This week we'll do the budget articles, which I don't expect a lot of controversy over. It's the usual (over the past 5-10 years) "level service minus some", so we don't notice all that's been lost over the longer period of time. We'll also do a "" article, which will pit the SUV drivers against the Prius drivers?