TRURO — The warrant for last fall’s special town meeting, which was repeatedly postponed amid a series of voter registration challenges and then moved from November to May when a huge turnout exceeded the capacity of Truro Central School, will be voted on on Saturday, May 4 and will look almost exactly as it did last fall.
The special town meeting warrant will be kept separate from articles for the regular spring town meeting, and the meetings will probably be held on separate days. At a work session on Feb. 8, the select board rejected the idea of holding both meetings on one day.
“Nine hours back-to-back” would be too much, said board member Stephanie Rein. “I don’t want anyone to feel like they have to leave because it’s more than they can physically handle.”
“The likelihood of our getting through two meetings in one day — I don’t think that’s high,” agreed board member Sue Areson.
Back-to-back meetings would also be complicated by the fact that the voter rolls for the meetings would be different.
The deadline to register for the special town meeting was Oct. 11; a slew of challenged and withdrawn registrations caused the first of several postponements of that meeting. Because the May 4 warrant will be the same as the one scheduled for Oct. 21 — technically, it is the same meeting, continued multiple times — the voter registration deadline for that meeting is still in effect.
The annual town meeting, which will likely be on May 5, will have a voter registration deadline around April 30. That means there will be people who can vote at one meeting but not the other.
Town officials raised the possibility of giving out voter cards of different colors to distinguish between voters who could vote at both meetings and voters who could vote only at annual town meeting.
Rein said that was too loose a system to be reliable.
“As a person who has worked in a nightclub, you’ve got to clear the house,” Rein said. She didn’t think voters would exchange voter cards with each other but said that “even if that opportunity is there, it puts a cloud over the voting experience.”
Board chair Kristen Reed said she was more “comfortable with taking the criticism of a two-day meeting than the criticism of uncontrollable chaos on the same day, and people passing each other cards of different colors, and people’s patience being stressed.”
Two Warrants
One article on the special town meeting warrant will have to be indefinitely postponed because costs have gone up since October. Article 1, a $1.4-million debt exclusion to finance a new roof and HVAC system at Truro Central School, is no longer sufficient to cover the cost of that project.
Dept. of Public Works Director Jarrod Cabral told the select board that consultants had advised him to plan for a 10-percent increase, requiring a $1.54-million allocation.
A new debt exclusion in that amount will be added to the annual town meeting warrant, and Areson, the select board’s liaison to the school committee, will move indefinite postponement of Article 1 on May 4.
The biggest-ticket item on the special town meeting warrant is the DPW facility upgrade, whose cost estimates have not changed, Cabral told the select board.
The original warrant from last fall had included four different articles connected to that project.
The select board had sponsored Article 3, a $35-million appropriation to fund the entire project, and Article 4, a $3.5-million appropriation that would finance only the engineering and design work. The select board’s Article 2 would authorize the use of a town-owned parcel at 340 Route 6 for the new DPW building, while a petitioned article, numbered Article 14, would require the DPW to remain at its current location and direct the town to pursue the design concept of a self-appointed “DPW Study Group.”
Areson, the only board member who did not endorse the $35-million article last fall, told the board on Feb. 8 that she no longer supports the $3.5-million engineering-only measure.
“We’re at a point now where we don’t want to be doing just a piece of it,” she said.
Areson said she was still worried about the big-ticket article. “I would love nothing better than to give the DPW a $35-million facility,” she said. “My reading of the public and who showed up at town meeting is that I just don’t think it’s going to pass, and I don’t think we should wait until May and have it rejected.”
She said the board should “establish a plan B” by May.
“There was sticker shock with the community center,” Reed said, but after scaling that project back, “now we don’t have a community center that can hold the community.”
Reed said that, while she wanted to find common ground, “I am not in support of not supporting this.” The $35-million proposal “was arrived at thoughtfully, over years of process,” she said.
Board member John Dundas said the DPW “does things and we take it for granted. One of the things that we owe them is a really great place to work, a safe place to work.”
Rein and member Bob Weinstein both said that they would rather do away with the engineering-only article. Keeping it “seems to be a foolish thing because those engineering studies are based on the building that the town has advocated for,” Weinstein said.
The board agreed to work together to conduct outreach and explain their support for the $35-million appropriation in the coming months, in addition to convening a DPW ad hoc committee.
Capacity Issues
“The select board may need to make a decision on whether nonvoters can actually participate in this town meeting based on capacity,” Town Manager Darrin Tangeman said at the work session. He said that between voters and nonvoters, more than 1,000 people could turn out for the two town meetings.
Reed argued for full participation, saying the “huge, ever-growing trust issue in the town” required that everyone be able to attend the meeting.
“I’m not comfortable excluding nonresident taxpayers from the meeting,” Rein said on Feb. 8, citing a much-discussed feeling of disenfranchisement. Nonresidents should be able to have their voices heard, she said.
“There has to be participation,” said Reed. “I’m very uncomfortable with excluding people.”
Both town meetings are set to be held outdoors at the Truro Central School, but parking for that many cars is a problem.
“Location will inform process,” said Tangeman. “There’s a lot that we’re still working through.”
