[Editor’s Note: As you’ll see in my recap, this story involves my own actions — in the form of an amendment I proposed but failed to convince other voters to pass.]
At Saturday’s Special Town Meeting, voters overwhelmingly supported converting the position of Town Clerk from elected to an appointed job that reports the Select Board.
Town Meeting voters first rejected a proposed amendment (by me) to ratify the change through the next Town election. The passage of Article 1 authorized the Select Board to petition the state legislature to enact the change.
If the state legislatures approves the Town’s request, the Town Clerk position and question won’t appear on the ballot in May.
Hegarty wrote the Article for the Special Town Meeting before he retired at the end of September.1 The Select Board and Advisory Committee both unanimously supported it.
Speaking to the hall, Hegerty explained that he originally favored having an elected clerk but eventually changed his mind. He emphasized that modern election administration and state regulations have become far too technical and complex for “learn-on-the-job” training.
The person that you bring as a town clerk on day one has to know all the rules… if you make a mistake or you don’t know issues affecting people’s right to vote you’re going to affect people’s confidence in the election.
I proposed an amendment to strike the section authorizing the Select Board to petition the state. My argument was that the final decision to make the clerk an appointed position should remain strictly in the hands of town voters at the election ballot. (Scroll down for my explanation.)
Hegarty and several commenters disagreed with me. The overall sentiment was that the job was too important to risk allowing someone unqualified to win the seat in May.
Hegarty explained that he wanted to avoid having both the seat (to fill the last two years of the term) and question to change the seat to appointed on the same ballot. He asserted that having both would “confuse the be Jesus out of most voters”.
Jim Colleary agreed with Hegarty on the increased job complexity for Town government officials. (He believed that was less about rules changing and more about stricter enforcement requirements for compliance with regulations.) And he worried that amending the Article could lead to losing the Interim Town Clerk, Amy Berry. (Berry doesn’t live in town, so isn’t eligible to run for the seat. You can read more about her here.)
As for the idea that the position should report directly to voters instead of the Select Board, he referred to the small percentage of registered voters that participate in the Town election:
So, everybody’s saying the voters should say. The voters don’t show up to say. We need this town government to run efficient and organized. If we don’t like the people they put in place we can take care of that at the ballot box with who put them in there.
Christina Murphy agreed that the position didn’t need to report directly to voters:
I don’t believe that given the technicality of this role and the fact that it is not an inherently political position that it necessarily needs to be an elected position. It seems a lot more appropriate to me that it would be appointed based on the Select Board’s opinion.
She also preferred allowing both options for making the change (the petition and ballot question) in case the Town runs into more of the legal technicalities that Hegarty had described earlier.
In his presentation, Hegarty explained why his Article hadn’t been presented at the last Annual Town Meeting as originally planned when he announced his intent to retire.
Hegarty said the state government had given him differing opinions on the timing for the process. According to “Some”, 60 days needed to elapse between the Town Meeting vote and including the question on the ballot. Since the gap between the dates was smaller, he pushed the Article to this fall.
No one voice agreement with my amendment, and it failed in a near-unanimous vote.
Back on the main Article, Jim Eastman asked why making the change would result in more qualified candidates. Officials clarified that elected officials need to be Southborough residents. Changing to an appointment allows a much larger pool of candidates to apply.
Lynne McKay spoke in favor of the Article as someone who had experience volunteering for Town elections under both Jim Hegarty and his predecessor, Paul Berry:
I saw the changes over the years and I don’t think you can just take a chance on someone who decides to run, and runs unopposed, who may have absolutely no knowledge. . . we need it to be appointed so the Select Board can pick someone who has the knowledge and the experience to do the job.
Prior to my amendment, Meme Luttrell had asked the Select Board if they would commit that if the voters passed the Article, the board would appoint the current, “very talented”, Interim Town Clerk to the role.
Chair Kathy Cook responded that they couldn’t commit. Later, Cook clarified:
The select board can’t today say we would appoint Amy Berry as permanent Town Clerk because we haven’t voted. However, it is the same Select Board who voted 5-0 to appoint Miss Berry as Interim Town Clerk. So, you can infer from that what we think about the capability and quality of Amy Berry.
The hall voted, in what appeared to be unanimous or near-unanimous support.
Next Steps
This morning, the Select Board posted an agenda for a meeting on Friday morning. In it, they will vote on submitting their petition to the legislature.
On Saturday (before the meeting), Cook told me that State Representative Kate Donaghue has already agreed to submit the petition. But the Rep had warned that she wasn’t sure that it would be passed in time to avoid the position ending up on the ballot.
Explaining Why I Proposed the Amendment
Below is my position, as I unsuccessfully argued at the meeting:
I’m supportive of the concept of this article. It’s the specific part of the motion that takes it out of the hands of the town electorate that I don’t like. So, this body gets really mad sometimes when they feel that another branch of the government has taken away authority from town meeting usurped our power.
I reminded the hall on Saturday that when Paul Berry was retiring, he convinced Town Meeting that the Town Clerk should vote should report directly to town voters. Multiple people ran including Hegarty, who was elected. I followed:
[Hegarty] did a superb job. I actually think that he’s probably right, and I think that Amy Berry seems like a great choice. But I do think that there should be the opportunity that between now and town election, someone else can run. If the voters say, “Okay, nobody qualified, or nobody at all, is running for this position, and we think it should be appointed”, they’ll make that decision on the town election ballot.
