Brattleboro has long done town meeting its own way.
Windham County’s largest town has what’s known as representative town meeting, which delegates the tasks of debating town business and voting on the budget to 150 representatives elected by their fellow residents.
Brattleboro is the only town in Vermont that votes on its budget this way, and for 65 years it’s pretty much worked.
But as costs rise and town governance grows more complicated, Brattleboro voters will decide whether it’s time for a change.
On March 3, all Brattleboro voters will consider a ballot with three questions: whether to move on from representative town meeting, whether to hold an open in-person town meeting in the future, and whether to start holding Australian ballot votes on the budget.
But because of the way the ballot came together in Brattleboro, with two petitions coming in from residents that can’t be ignored or delayed, each question could potentially win.
Or each question could be voted down.
The confusion about the ballot comes at a high stakes moment for Brattleboro, which has faced double-digit municipal budget increases over the past few years and growing pressure on its police department to address crime, drug use and homelessness.
On the day after the vote this year, the town could be facing a clear path forward about the future of how it holds town meeting, or a tangled morass of competing results that might require the Legislature to figure things out.
“It totally troubles me. And it’s really hard to figure out how to get the explanation out for this whole thing,” said Kate O’Connor, a member of Brattleboro’s Charter Revision Commission.
Every 10 years or so, Brattleboro puts a charter commission together to see if the town governance needs tweaking.
"It was this clear consensus of what we were hearing from people, was that, ‘Well, representative town meeting has been great, but it needs to change.'"Kate O'Connor, Brattleboro Charter Revision Commission
And O’Connor was chairing the committee when they started talking about dropping the representative town meeting model.
“It was this clear consensus of what we were hearing from people, was that, ‘Well, representative town meeting has been great, but it needs to change,’” O’Connor said.
Two recent votes underscored that feeling for some residents.
At a special meeting in December 2024, the representatives overturned a select board ordinance that gave the police more discretion to issue fines for trespassing and other anti-social behaviors.
And at town meeting the following year, representatives rejected a select board-approved budget for the first time in the town’s history.
Tom Franks is a Brattleboro resident who’s been an elected town meeting representative for about 20 years, and he thinks it’s time for a change.
“This is an exclusive, and I will say, entitled group, that makes a decision for all the voters,” Franks said.
The model worked well enough for a while, according to Franks, back when the tax rate only inched up each year, and there wasn’t a feeling that crime and drug activity was out of control.
When that special meeting was called in December 2024 to overturn the “acceptable conduct” ordinance, Franks said, a lot of people came away convinced that the model was broken.
“It felt like a setup to me,” Franks said. “It did not feel right.”
But not everyone is ready to give up on the model.
“We are representative of this community,” said Andy Davis, another town meeting representative, at a recent public meeting. “We need it. It has functioned well for 60 years and it will serve us as we face the future.”
The discussion about whether it’s better to hold an open town meeting, where issues can be debated face-to-face, or a vote by ballot, which supporters say allows many more people to weigh in, is a debate that has played out in towns across Vermont.
Whichever model they settle on, Brattleboro residents will still face an array of challenges: a housing shortage, the expense of maintaining services like recreation facilities and roads, and supporting a police department that says it’s had to answer an ever-increasing number of calls.
Social media is ablaze with impassioned arguments for Australian ballot, and open town meeting, and even some support for retaining representative town meeting as it is.
The only thing everyone can agree on is that if you have an opinion, get out and vote on March 3.
And good luck figuring out the ballot.
