Bylaws are like sausages...

Welcome back!

Well, that was some sort of Town Meeting, wasn’t it? There were motions to amend articles flying around the hall from start to finish, and much of the debate clustered around zoning articles. Usually the zoning article presentations are a good chance to go to the bathroom, but not this year!

The zoning and legal jargon was particularly on-point this year. There were words uttered that felt simultaneously sophisticated and borrowed straight from Jabberwocky. (‘Twas brillig and the slithy recodification… Did gyre and gimble in the derogation!)

Alas, they were all real words. Sudbury Town Meeting: Come for the legislating, stay for the vocabulary expansion!

Here’s what we have for you this week:

1. Annual Town Meeting Recap, In Haiku

2. Town Meeting Attendance — What’s Normal?

3. SudburyWeekly.com News Roundup

Let’s get into it!

Town Meeting Recap, In Haiku

By Kevin LaHaise

We covered WrestleMania Annual Town Meeting live this week, so we’ll point you to those stories in the SudburyWeekly.com News Roundup below. But why not add a little flair to that coverage with some poetry? Here’s a recap of Annual Town Meeting’s key moments, written in (very bad) haikus.

Select Board Chair Dretler’s State of the Town Address

Tense room sat idle;
anticipating debate.
She said united?

Article 3 — FY25 Budget

So very much money,
and so few questions were asked.
Taxes were due May 1.

Article 3 passed 261-8 without much debate.

Article 16 — Firearms Safety Business Use Zoning Bylaw

‘Twas a splendid mess.
A comedy of errors;
yet nobody is laughing.

Article 16 failed 163-88 after a motion to amend that succeeded, a motion to reconsider that failed, and a successful motion to amend that essentially undid the prior successful amendment. It was legislative mayhem.

Article 17 — Acquisition of MBTA Buildings

Owned by MBTA.
Better buy the buildings now,
before they ruin them.

Article 17 passed 151-8.

Article 28 — Electric Car Charging Stations for Goodnow Library

Funding for something
that is already funded.
Please exit stage left.

Article 28 was brought forward by the Goodnow Library Trustees and it was eventually Indefinitely Postponed by a vote of 126-33. The motion was made by the Finance Committee after considerable discussion in the hall, leaving many wondering why the article was brought forward in the first place.

Articles 29 and 30 — Building Permit and Conservation Commission Fee Increases

Ye olde fees went up.
It is couch cushion money…
Staving off more taxes?

Articles 29 and 30 passed without much drama. They were essentially a “mulligan” on articles that were presented at Special Town Meeting in October 2023. With the fee increases now separated out from the other content in the original articles, and debated on their own merits, Town Meeting was willing to pass them.

Article 32 — Site Plan Review

People seem to like
the Zoning Board of Appeals.
That seems uncommon.

Article 32 failed by one vote, 61-62. If passed, it would have eliminated the Zoning Board of Appeals role in any appeals to the Planning Board’s site plan reviews.

Articles 33/34 — MBTA Communities Zoning

Sudbury avoids
the Attorney General’s
noncompliance wrath.

While MBTA Communities compliance has been controversial in other communities, these articles easily passed in Sudbury. There were only 23 combined “no” votes on the two articles.

Article 45 — Amend General Bylaws by Adding “Disability”

Kay Bell brought hard data
And briskly made a strong case
to do the right thing.

Town Meeting closed with a 100-4 vote to pass this Citizen Petition. It adds “disability” as a protected condition against discrimination in the Equal Opportunity chapter of the Town’s bylaws.

Town Meeting Attendance — What’s Normal?

By Kevin LaHaise

Sudbury’s Annual Town Meeting had a peak attendance of 317 residents on Monday, and 182 residents on Tuesday. How does that compare to prior Town Meetings? And how does that compare to other towns with Open Town Meetings? We pulled attendance data that was reported in a variety of places including Town Proceedings, Annual Town Reports, Town Meeting Results pages on the Town website, and recap discussions of the Select Board. We also got the official records from the Town Clerk’s office.

Sudbury Annual Town Meeting Attendance

Next, we gathered data from surrounding towns. It turns out, there’s no standard way that attendance data is tracked across municipalities, which made things a bit difficult.

Acton Annual Town Meeting Attendance

Concord Annual Town Meeting Attendance

Wayland Town Meeting Attendance

*Wayland’s attendance reporting was highly inconsistent and attendance changed dramatically over the course of their meetings. We compiled vote tallies from articles to find an approximate peak attendance when peak attendance was not explicitly reported in their minutes. Please treat the Wayland numbers as approximate counts.

It was fairly typical across all towns we surveyed for the Town to report a peak attendance number on multi-day Town Meetings, but also to change how they reported from year to year as they adopted new technologies like electronic clickers, or they just opted to start reporting the attendance on each day rather than a peak number.

Looking a bit more broadly across Massachusetts, one study in the New England Journal of Political Science found that Town Meeting attendance amounted to two percent of the adult population in the towns that they surveyed. They only reviewed data from a handful of towns, and it was published in 2020, but the general trend seems to be holding true in Sudbury and towns around Sudbury.

Of course, some towns have “Open Town Meeting” and some have Representative Town Meetings. Wellesley, for example, has a Representative Town Meeting. They elect 240 representatives in staggered terms. But a review of their scorecards (voting results) shows that they fell well short of 200 representatives/votes for most of the articles at their 2024 Annual Town Meeting.

Lexington also has a Representative Town Meeting, of no more than 203 representatives, and in 2023 the highest vote count on any article was 169. Representation at those Representative Town Meetings is a bit lower than the trend line at the Open Town Meetings we surveyed, and significantly lower when there are attendance spikes for hot-button issues at Open Town Meetings. That appears to be the case in Acton and Concord this year.

Sudbury’s Open Town Meeting attendance is in the same ballpark as a “typical” year in the last five years across neighboring towns, even if a little less robust than Acton and Concord.

Parting Thoughts

The chatter around Sudbury is all about the chaos that unfolded on Monday night of Annual Town Meeting, and growing tensions among the Select Board members. Who would have thought gun control would be a divisive topic in a Presidential election year? Maybe it’s like drinking orange juice after brushing your teeth? You’ve done it before, you know it’s awful, but you keep doing it accidentally?

Alas, there may be more acrimony ahead. The Select Board is meeting on Tuesday and will be discussing how Annual Town Meeting went with the Town Moderator. After an executive session they’ll be returning to open session to elect their next Chair and Vice-Chair, as is their standard process after Annual Town Meeting. The Tuesday meeting could be more of the same, or an opportunity for Sudbury’s elected leaders to lower the temperature. Tune in to SudburyTV to find out.

Onward!