Quorum Requirement for Town Meetings

One item on the agenda for the upcoming town meeting is a proposal to change the quorum requirement from 60 to 150. I'm the author of that proposal. I've seen too many instances of meetings being "stacked" by a small group of people - often people who otherwise don't attend town meetings regularly - who have a particular interest in some matter and who pass (or defeat) that matter even though a more representative group of voters would have voted the other way. Would you want the US Senate to have a quorum requirement of 7 (out of 100) so that 4 senators could pass legislation even if the other 96 senators would have voted the other way? That's essentially the situation in Egremont.

On a number of occasions in recent years, I (with the help of others) have had to rally voters to come to a town meeting because otherwise a small group of dedicated people would have pushed through some action that would have helped them but hurt the rest of us. That just isn't democratic and it just isn't right. And it should be changed.

The problem is even worse when it comes to special town meetings. They're often far more unrepresentative than annual town meetings, because the voters who are affected by the issue under consideration come out in droves but the voters who aren't directly affected by it tend to stay home. That has happened twice in recent memory at special meetings deciding whether to buy another fire truck. What if there were a special meeting to decide whether the town should take over the water company? You know what would happen - the water company users would descend on the meeting en masse to vote in favor of a takeover, and they might prevail, even though a representative vote would likely have been overwhelmingly the other way.

And the problem is made worse by the tendency of our current selectmen to call special town meetings to decide important issues, a practice that I strongly oppose. Most recent example: The selectmen were moving toward putting the annex/library issue on the agenda for the upcoming meeting, but now are talking about a special meeting later this year for that decision. Why? I have my suspicions. What are yours?