Editor's Note: David Rennie, who writes and blogs for The Economist, attended Town Meeting in Duxbury this year and published this column about his experience on March 7 in his Lexington blog, this post titled "Of dogs and democracy." This piece includes the original British punctuation.
What an elected dogcatcher reveals about small-town America
By David Rennie
A MIXTURE of altruism and self-interest first prompted Zebulon Towne, a surveyor's assistant and maple-sugar-maker, to volunteer for the official post of dogcatcher in Duxbury, his hometown in Vermont. Some ten years ago Mr Towne owned a clever but faithless canine called Biscuit whose great joy was running away. So often was the hound found by locals, prompting phone calls either to her owner or to the dogcatcher, that Mr Towne decided: "It might as well be me both times."
The part-time office comes with neither pay nor special equipment. It is mostly a "mediation job", Mr Towne has discovered, after years of resolving disputes about dogs that are noisy, ill-treated or have just eaten someone's chickens. However, holding the office does involve one solemn condition, even if it sounds more like a political punchline. Duxbury's dogcatcher is formally elected each year at "town meeting", an annual mini-parliament that is held in towns across Vermont and New England, typically in early March. In places such as Duxbury, following traditions that date back to colonial times, all adult residents are invited to become legislators for a day, electing dozens of office-holders and debating the fine details of budgets, such as which brand of dump truck to buy.
Even in Vermont some question the value of such citizen-government. On March 3rd, this year's statewide Town Meeting Day, sceptics noted that just 11% of registered voters attend the average town meeting in Vermont, and that the number is falling. This year the town of Monkton rejected a proposal to let residents skip town meeting and take decisions by dropping off a paper ballot at a polling station: a change that other communities have adopted to increase turnout (but which killed their town meetings). Some towns voted to move meetings to the evening, so that more working-age locals can attend, or to a Saturday. The town of Bethel offered those who showed up this year child care and free pie.
Yet after attending Duxbury's assembly, which drew 144 people, or one in seven registered voters, Lexington came away persuaded that—if it can be saved—town meeting has much to teach politicians farther afield. It is not that such gatherings are all beaming goodwill. Mr Towne was re-elected unopposed, retaining his status as America's only elected dogcatcher (some other Vermont towns elect animal-control officers). But the meeting was bruising for some of his neighbours. The budget was challenged line by line, down to the cost of laundering road-crew uniforms. Individual town employees found themselves explaining why they worked hard enough to deserve their pay.
A member of the selectboard, or town council, abruptly resigned after being accused of arrogance towards the "dirt road people", meaning the many locals who live on the steep wooded tracks that lead up from the town's only paved road. Seething suspicions were aired, notably around public debts run up a few years ago as Duxbury was rebuilt after a big flood. Nor was the meeting strikingly efficient. It lasted more than eight hours, including a break for a potluck lunch, and much time was spent discussing points of procedure.
The impressive part is how Duxbury deals with conflict. Deep differences are often visible, as old-time conservatives butt heads with liberal newcomers, or pony-tailed professionals compete for election against retirees in check shirts. Sometimes transparency is painful, as when votes are held by a show of hands, forcing neighbour to snub neighbour. There is a lot of grumbling. As Duxbury's elected moderator drily asked at one point, as he attempted to press on with the agenda: "Is everyone relatively happy?" But transparency also eases distrust: some of the angriest interventions turned out to have roots in a misunderstanding. The mere fact of being allowed to air grievances left several speakers visibly mollified, and willing to bow to the consensus in the room. All those hours sitting on hard chairs in a school canteen left Duxbury residents weary. But the repeated votes and endless discussions also left them with a personal stake in the running of the town for the coming year.
People power, unleashed
The absence of party labels helps, as does a taboo against overt campaigning for office. Rebecca Ellis served on the selectboard of the next-door town of Waterbury for eight years. She now sits in the state House of Representatives as a Democrat, and admits that: "At the state level, almost everything goes through on a Democratic or Republican track." A town meeting is less predictable. The system may not always produce elegant decision-making: Waterbury recently spent three years debating whether to build a new municipal office and, if so, whether to combine it with the library. But, says Ms Ellis, it creates a core of engaged citizens: "You get a better town out of this system."
It would be hard to replicate town meeting elsewhere. Vermont is a curious state, where good manners and civic spirit co-exist with curmudgeonly individualism and self-reliance. But there is no need to clone town meeting for its example to do some good. Frank Bryan, a political scientist at the University of Vermont, is the author of "Real Democracy", a study of almost 1,500 New England town meetings. He writes: "If town meeting teaches anything, it is how to suffer damn fools and to appreciate the fact that from time to time you too may look like a damn fool in the eyes of people as good as yourself."
All too often, national politics takes the opposite approach, pandering to partisans and corralling them into tribes that concede nothing to the other side. Not every town needs to elect its dogcatcher. But democracy that asks a bit more of its citizens is worth a try.
(Reprinted with permission from The Economist, 7th March 2015.)
