Town Meeting Day, Democracy at the Local Level

On the first Tuesday of March every year, Vermont towns call their citizens to a meeting. Not a representative meeting, where elected officials vote on everyone's behalf. The actual meeting, where any registered voter in the town can stand up, speak, and cast a vote on the town budget, the school budget, local ordinances, road maintenance, and whatever else the warning, which is what Vermont calls the agenda, puts on the table.

This is town meeting democracy. It is one of the few surviving examples of direct democracy at the governance level in the United States, and Vermont has been practicing it, more or less continuously, since the colonial period. The form dates back to the Puritan town meetings of seventeenth-century New England, but Vermont institutionalized it in ways that most of the region eventually abandoned. Vermont towns are still legally required to hold an annual meeting, and they still take it seriously.

The range of what gets decided is broad. Voters approve or reject the annual highway department budget line by line. They vote on whether to keep the local library open or reduce its hours. They argue about school consolidation, about whether to hire a new town clerk at the current salary, about road paving priorities. In smaller towns of a few hundred residents, the decisions are immediate and personal. The person who plows your road in a Vermont winter is someone you might vote against on a budget line, and then see at church the next Sunday.

Political scientists who study direct democracy have studied Vermont town meeting for decades. The town meeting scholar Frank Bryan at the University of Vermont observed a great many Vermont town meetings over several decades, documenting who speaks, who votes, and what actually gets decided. His conclusion was that Vermont town meeting is not just a historical survival or a quaint tradition. It is a functioning institution in which ordinary citizens exercise real authority over real money in real time. Many Vermont town meetings run a full day. Decisions made there govern communities for the following year.