Hi, Southbridge folks!
Quick update on the (lack of) meeting video: I’ve been having problems with the Mac I typically use for digitizing the meetings. Please bear with me.
In the meantime: I couldn’t help but notice that even before the infamous petition started making the rounds there was a storm of Internet Drama brewing, huge even by Southbridge standards. I’m pretty sure I’ve yet to meet someone who’s perfectly happy with our Charter as it stands; I mean, even the majority of our current sitting Town Councilors are hoping to change it this year. (Ugh.)
Other folks in town want us to return to a Town Meeting form of government and have started collecting signatures on a petition. (In the interest of full disclosure: I would support a change along these lines, with the caveat that I do not like a lot of the aspects of the petition as written, and I think the best way for a municipality to go about substantive Charter changes is by way of an elected Charter Commission.)
Still others think we’d be better off with a Mayor form of government, although to the best of my knowledge there doesn’t seem to be any sort of activist push to organize for same. (A brief FYI: arguing on the Internet does not count as activism.)
Not being one who likes to wander into a knife fight without first making a spreadsheet, I looked up a bunch of information from the 2010 Census, the Mass. Municipal Association, and the Mass DOR. I wanted to see where we fit in with other towns and cities across Massachusetts in terms of our form of government, our population, and our property taxes. This is what I came up with:
Forms of Municipal Gov’t in MA, with Population & Property Tax Info
(If you don’t have Excel on your computer, you can view it in Google Docs right over here.)
FYI, the property tax info came from the DOR’s “Average Single Family Tax Bills and Values” worksheet (available here), which excludes communities with a residential exemption for their local property taxes. (I had no idea before tonight there was such a thing as a residential exemption for local property taxes, and now I’m totally jealous of the communities that utilize one. The Hingham, MA Assessor’s office has more information if you want to learn more about them.)
It doesn’t do anything fancy, but by playing around with the “Sort” feature on my dumb little worksheet I have so far noticed the following:
-The Council-Manager form of government is exceedingly rare here in Massachusetts. Out of 351 municipalities across the state, there are only eight communities in Massachusetts with this organizational structure. (Nine if you count Franklin and their Council-Town Administrator setup.)
-We’re the only community in Worcester County with this form of government.
-The overwhelming majority of towns and cities with Councils serving as thier legislative bodies (as opposed to Open or Representative Town Meetings) have Mayors. (46 out of 55.)
-Most Massachusetts communities with Mayors are much larger than ours: out of 45 communities with Mayors, only four are under 20,000 people.
-Most communities with Town Managers in the role of Chief Municipal Officer have BOS/Town Meeting forms of Gov’t. (56 out of a total of 63.)
-Most communities with our approximate population have Town Meeting forms of government. There are 43 cities and towns in Massachusetts with populations between 14,000 and 20,000 residents. Of these communities, only two have Council-Manager forms of government, including Southbridge. Four have Mayor-Council forms of government, three have Representative Town Meetings, and the remaining thirty-four have Open Town Meeting forms of government.
-At this point, I haven’t seen any link between form of municipal government and property tax rates or the average yearly property tax bill for single family homes.
What’s my takeaway from all of this? …I don’t really know. I haven’t really been all that vocal on this issue because I’ve been spending a lot of time trying to collect my thoughts. I definitely don’t like the status quo here in town, but I think we need to do a lot more than change our organizational chart to turn this ship around. I think one of the biggest problems we face here in town (aside from economic development) is a lack of civic engagement. Would people be more active in local government if they could vote on the Town’s budget at Annual Town Meetings? Would more voters participate in local elections if someone were running for Mayor?
…I think I’m going to need another spreadsheet.
