Get Off Our Duff's Day (Valley News - Op-Ed)

To the Editor:

We hold to certain political myths despite all the evidence to the contrary. There’s the inevitable election cycle hand-wringing that the current election is somehow more negative than elections past. Or the idea that the votes of a plurality of a minority of eligible voters somehow constitutes a “mandate” to govern by the majority.

Nearer to home, much is made of “town meeting” as though it manifests a more pure, meaningful, and participatory method of self-government. However, anyone who regularly attends town meeting can tell you it is often less participatory democracy than a lecture hall informational session: Elected town officials explain to a minority of town voters what was decided in preceding months of budgetary meetings and why they should approve those decisions. The myth of town meeting is not necessarily a bad thing. Certainly, there’s something to be said for having the Selectboard and school board stand before the electorate to account for their respective budgets. However, our praise is misplaced when we focus on town meeting to the neglect of participatory town government.

Take an evening drive through any small Vermont or New Hampshire town and you’ll likely see lights burning in a few windows of town hall. Inside you’ll find local volunteers spending their evening slogging away at the real stuff of self-government, be they planning or conservation commissioners, permitting boards, or members of myriad ad-hoc town committees and commissions trying to work together to do what’s best for their town and fellow townspeople. They work without pay -- often without meaningful budgetary or staff support – taking time from their families and their leisure to make something more of the community they’ve inherited. They do it because they feel they owe something to their community or simply because they want to be involved and belong.

Unfortunately, in a society growing ever more complex, regulatory, and litigious, the disincentives to volunteer participation are also growing. As life feels busier, it’s easy to feel out-of-touch with “what’s going on” in town government. Finding the time to figure out what’s happening, let alone where one might want to put one’s efforts, slips down the list of priorities until it’s not much more than a dull guilty feeling that one isn’t more involved.

Here in Norwich, a small group of us have decided to do something about it. We’ve rented space in the local elementary school for the Saturday before Town Meeting to conduct a “Get Off Your Duff Day.” It is a day where townspeople can meet the people serving on the various volunteer boards in town, learn about what they do and hope to achieve, understand the time commitment involved, and enter the on-going debate of town government. The goal is to make “what’s going on” tangible for those who wish to know and break down the distance between those who are making it happen and those who would like to. We hope this will become an annual tradition in Norwich to accompany Town Meeting and wouldn’t mind at all if the idea spread to neighboring communities.