With another year of Open Town Meeting coming to a close this week, a group of local residents is continuing their push to change the annual convening and restructure Andover’s government.
These residents say the current Open Town Meeting, which has been around for more than 350 years, is inefficient, voicing issues such as low turnout of voters, lack of representation of viewpoints, and the late-evening hours of Town Meeting that make it inconvenient for parents. Residents are required to attend the annual meeting in person to vote on multiple key issues facing the town, such as budgets, bylaws, and citizen petitions.
“We feel [Town Meeting] has become unrepresentative,” said Richard Howe, the chair of the Committee for a New Andover Charter, which has been leading the push for a structural change to Town Meeting for several years.
The committee is petitioning the town to establish a charter commission that would be tasked with determining a different structure for Town Meeting.
Town officials, in response to residents’ ongoing concerns, had established the Town Governance Study Committee, which first met in September 2019, and tasked it with analyzing Andover’s charter and governance laws for Town Meeting.
This story was published as part of a collaboration between Andover News and the Department of Journalism in Boston University’s College of Communication. The student journalist is a member of Professor Meghan E. Irons’s Reporting in Depth class.
In a 2021 report, the committee agreed unanimously that Andover is “best served by retaining Open Town Meeting” and recommended several reforms to the charter, such as adopting in-person electronic voting, which has since been implemented, and allowing residents to discuss and submit articles and amendments ahead of Town Meeting.
The committee argues that the reforms do not go far enough. Members said Town Meeting doesn’t effectively represent Andover’s population of 36,363 residents. This year, about 450 voters attended the meeting.
Committee members said many residents are often unable to attend because of parenting, work and physical limitations and cite other barriers to attending the meeting that is typically held for multiple hours on weekday nights.
Voters Split On Doing Away With Open Town Meeting
Brad Langhorst, who lives on Meadow View Lane and attended Tuesday’s meeting, said the requirement to attend in person in order is “terribly inefficient.”
“Not everybody can do that,” Langhorst said. “We don’t have to be there on the date at that time and spend many hours, evenings [and] weekends.”
Langhorst also said requiring residents to vote in person “disenfranchises people with young children.”
“It makes it way more difficult for them to participate,” Langhorst said.
Langhorst said he thinks remote voting is a more effective option for voters. “People could be informed and still participate in government that way, but have it be asynchronous,” he said.
However, other residents think remote voting is not suitable for Town Meeting. Andrew Szendey, who lives on Marilyn Road and has been attending Town Meeting for 30 years, said at first he thought it would be better to vote at home.
“The more and more I look at it….I don’t think they’ve figured out a way to do remote voting other than [by] ballot box,” Szendey said.
“People that are passionate about topics are coming,” said Maura Szendey, also of Marilyn Road “I don’t think that doing it by voting is going to get more people out.”
The Committee for a New Andover Charter had also proposed a Representative Town Meeting, which would have a 150-200 members elected by precinct.
But, Szendey said a representative form of town meeting would not increase voter turnout and would ensure that citizens “don’t really have the input.”
“I think we have the best system,” Szendey said.
Committee Continues Collecting Signatures
According to the Massachusetts Municipal Association, a petition to adopt home charters has to be signed by at least 15 percent of registered voters to raise the question of creating a Charter Commission at Town Meeting.
For Andover, this comes to about 4,000 signatures. Howe said the committee has about 3,000 signatures and is looking to add the question to the ballot for next year’s Town Meeting.
“Even if people don’t know exactly how they would vote when it comes up on the ballot, this at least gives us a chance to put it on the ballot and to have a good community discussion about our form of government,” Howe said.
Langhorst said that while he likes the history of Town Meeting, there is “probably a better way” to have Town Meeting.
“I like the idea of participatory democracy where everybody has a say,” Langhorst said. “So if we can find a way to preserve that and bring things into the modern age that would be, I think, ideal.”