Editorial
Getting people to come

Ashburnham voters debated for more than 30 minutes whether or not to eliminate the quorum - 75 people - required to hold a town meeting.

Voters rejected the proposals by town officials to eliminate the quorum requirement by a vote of 39 to 53 after a lot of discussion about the need to prevent small groups from conducting the town's business.

And now, for good or for bad, the decision has been made for the moment. The question, which was posed on the town meeting floor and still needs to be answered, is, how could no more than 1 percent of registered voters turn out for the meeting and what do we do to change that?

The first answer is to possibly get more people involved in town government. Because if you look at the voter turnout lists, of the 99 people who turned out of the meeting, you will find that more than 35 of them are on a town board or are a town employee that lives in town, and another 10 of them are former town officials or school employees.

This could tell you many things, and it might help to answer the question of "how do you change these actions to get people to turnout?" Get more people on the town boards.

This might cause the problem that government employees and board members may be inclined to support articles that other people don't necessarily support or reject articles that the public in general would support.

Okay, so what is another idea? One way to get people more people to come to the meeting is to provide food. Free food seems to be away to get people at attend other events, why not try it with the town meeting.

Or maybe we, all of us, might need to stop talking in government jargon and try to convenience people that their vote on local politics does matter. People seem to care when the school and the town disagree about budgets or when a new building is being considered.

Maybe it is time to show that even small articles such as whether or not a quorum is required at town meeting is something important to the residents.