Annual Town Meeting recap

Above: Voters made a variety of spending and administrative decisions yesterday. (images editd from past Town presentations and communications)

Yesterday, a small percentage* of Southborough voters showed up to spend over six hours making decisions about Southborough’s finances and bylaws.

Annual Town Meeting voters agreed to fund improving public safety, pursuing a Library expansion project, investing in Town recreational assets, stabilizing special education budget impacts, preserving the Town’s history and seed money for Tricentennial celebrations. They also enabled pursuit of a solar project at Trottier and agreed to clean up zoning language.

They even weighed in on the Patriot’s decision to fire Bill Belichick!

That last item was part of an introduction and test use of new “clickers” at Town Meeting. Those were intended to speed up the counting of close votes. In the end, none of yesterday’s votes were actually close enough to require using the devices.

(For those wondering, over 68% of voters agreed with Kraft’s decision to split with the Pats’ coach.)

Real votes included supporting a former Town official’s request to increase the Town’s proposed budgets to allow the hiring of two additional public safety dispatchers.

Between the budgets and other Fiscal Year 2025 spending approvals, the property tax increase next year is projected to be a little over 4% for the average homeowner. (Although, that could go up based on decisions to be made at a Special Town Meeting planned for late September.)

I’ll cover more details later this week, especially on the debates over the budget and the schools’ requests. 

For now, I’ll sum up that only two Articles were rejected outright by voters.

One “opposed” vote was one of the three requests made by the town’s three public school systems to establish stabilization funds. If administrators want to find a way to reduce budget impacts of emergency capital expenses at Algonquin, they will have to pursue a different method.

Voters also failed to support a Citizen’s Petition that the petitioner acknowledged would likely be deemed illegal by the Attorney General’s office but would serve as advice. That final Article on the Warrant would have required a 2/3 vote to spend Community Preservation Act funds on privately owned property.

That doesn’t mean that everything else on the Warrant passed. As I previously previewed, six Citizen Petition Articles were indefinitely postponed at the request of the lead petitioners.

In addition, voters agreed with commenters who asked to indefinitely postpone adopting bylaws on a future advisory committee for the Dept of Public Works. The message from the hall was that officials should bring back a cleaned up version to the Special Town Meeting this fall.

Voters also amended a zoning Article that would have otherwise limited the Zoning Board of Appeals ability to grant Special Permit extensions. Special Permits are now defined to expire after two years unless the ZBA grants an extension for one year. But the board also will have the ability to grant an extension multiple times.

You can read more details about what the meeting was voting on in my pre-Town Meeting post here.

*I don’t have the official peak number of voters who signed in yet, but a test vote at the start of the meeting only tallied 105 responses. That’s less than 1.5% of registered voters. And by the end of the meeting, the number in the room was definitely fewer than at the start.