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Stephanie's Town Meeting Experience

  • ex officio

    Number of comments: 3
    Well, that was different.

    Instead of wondering where to sit, my seat was assigned.

    And I spoke to more articles last night than I spoke to in all the sessions of the previous two years combined.

    And my hand wasn’t all cramped up at the end.

    [...]
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    Posted: April 29, 2008, 8:04pm EDT
    by Stephanie O'Keeffe

  • I didn't forget

    Number of comments: 1

    Apparently holidays and meeting recaps don’t mix well, so let’s hope Town Meeting finishes up before Christmas.

    Here's a scaled-down account of last week’s session, lest I end up two meetings behind.

    Bad start: I could hear the gavel bang and the meeting come to' [...]

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    Posted: November 28, 2007, 10:52am EST
    by Stephanie O'Keeffe

  • Perpetual motions

    Number of comments: 13

    Every now and then a meeting is so grueling that I curse this whole blog thing. This was one of those meetings.

    Things started well enough – the quorum was announced at 7:40 and the meeting began about a minute later. The Moderator said that he would be [...]

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    Posted: November 16, 2007, 7:55pm EST
    by Stephanie O'Keeffe

  • Inching forward

    Number of comments: 6

    Not so quick this time, but progress was made.

    It started off pretty late. The constable’s announcement of the quorum came at about 7:40, and we didn’t start until ten minutes after that. Tough to know what to do about that. People sitting around me were grumbling about [...]

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    Posted: November 09, 2007, 12:18am EST
    by Stephanie O'Keeffe

  • Off to a quick start

    Number of comments: 2

    Last night was so efficient! I thought I had wandered in to some other town’s Town Meeting. Very impressive.

    Started with the usual welcome and procedural stuff. Turns out the meeting wasn’t being broadcast live on ACTV due to some glitch, but it would be re-broadcast. Click [...]

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    Posted: November 06, 2007, 9:23pm EST
    by Stephanie O'Keeffe

  • Time flies -- Fall TM is almost here

    Number of comments: 4
    In preparation for Fall TM, you might be interested in the following:

    TMCC’s Zoning Orientation Forum – 7:00 p.m. in the Town Room at Town Hall

    Rebroadcasts of the Warrant Review Meeting on ACTV’s Channel 17 (It’s on at weird times – you might want to tape it. [...]
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    Posted: October 30, 2007, 8:52pm EDT
    by Stephanie O'Keeffe

  • Post-TM reflections finally up

    Number of comments: 0
    A few days, a few weeks – whatever.

    It took until the end of July, but I finally put up my TM post mortem. Click here to read it, if you’re interested.
    [...]
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    Posted: July 31, 2007, 8:50pm EDT
    by Stephanie O'Keeffe

  • Twelfth Night

    Number of comments: 11
    This was it. Another epic Town Meeting was coming to an end. But not until we got through four more articles.

    Before that however, an announcement: Members from precincts 5 and 8 wouldn’t quite be done with TM tonight, because they will hold elections to fill vacancies at 7:00 [...]
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    Posted: June 22, 2007, 9:40am EDT
    by Stephanie O'Keeffe

  • Penultimate, perhaps

    Number of comments: 1
    The school year is over. The Middle School is sparkling clean. The music room, where the Select Board meetings are held before Town Meeting, has had all its posters and student work removed, and the chalk boards look brand new.

    But we’re still here.

    Week 7, session 11, [...]
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    Posted: June 19, 2007, 9:06pm EDT
    by Stephanie O'Keeffe

  • Better late than never?

    Number of comments: 1
    OK, here’s the tardy and abbreviated version.

    Intro: The Moderator said to be prepared for the possibility of meeting next Thursday. Uggh! We then approved moving Articles 27 and 28 to the end of the warrant. These are CPAC open space articles and their details are still being worked [...]
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    Posted: June 18, 2007, 9:04am EDT
    by Stephanie O'Keeffe

  • Brain fry

    Number of comments: 3
    No, I haven’t fled to Shutesbury in pursuit of a one-day Town Meeting. It’s tempting, but then I couldn’t walk to Bueno.

    I just haven’t written up Wednesday’s meeting yet, nor the SB meeting for that matter. I go through a bit of recap burn-out every so often, [...]
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    Posted: June 16, 2007, 5:43pm EDT
    by Stephanie O'Keeffe

  • Robbing Peter to pay pool

    Number of comments: 14
    If it weren’t for the debt service vote at the end, we might actually have made negative progress on the warrant. Otherwise, we spent the whole night on Cherry Hill and pools, two subjects that just haven’t had quite enough discussion yet.

    I could just cut and paste [...]
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    Posted: June 12, 2007, 6:01pm EDT
    by Stephanie O'Keeffe

  • If only the override had passed

    Number of comments: 2
    Wednesday’s motion sheet had included one for reconsideration of the Regional Schools’ budget, and I thought to myself, “Here we go…” I was not expecting it to be the Finance Committee seeking reconsideration.

    Sure enough, it turns out that the symbolic 2% vote from Monday isn’t quite good enough. [...]
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    Posted: June 07, 2007, 11:24pm EDT
    by Stephanie O'Keeffe

  • School daze

    Number of comments: 15
    Appropriate to the theme of the evening, we began with a gentle reminder: Boys and girls – behave yourselves! No taunting, hitting, biting or spitballs, especially during tally votes. Apparently, there had been an incident…

    After a procedural motion to postpone Community Services, we took up the school budgets, [...]
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    Posted: June 05, 2007, 9:14pm EDT
    by Stephanie O'Keeffe

  • Inching forward, ever so slowly

    Number of comments: 3
    The previous post was a mere snippet of the meeting, evocative though it was. This one is the whole enchilada.

    First up, Jim Chumbley moved to reconsider Article 16 – approval of the regional school assessment formula. He said that the new information regarding the Department of Education’s interpretation [...]
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    Posted: June 02, 2007, 3:07pm EDT
    by Stephanie O'Keeffe

  • Debate and debase

    Number of comments: 4
    I think I would choose a night of foreign policy articles over the human services funding.

    The low point of my evening: when a respected member of multiple major town committees came up behind me – I was sitting in the back row – as I was handing in [...]
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    Posted: June 01, 2007, 2:46am EDT
    by Stephanie O'Keeffe

  • A matter of priorities

    Number of comments: 4
    No time for the whole play-by-play, so we’re just hitting the highlights here.

    From the Moderator: TMCC election winners: Harry Brooks, Carol Gray, and Judy Simpson. Also: with the close margin for Monday’s tally vote, which had first appeared to be 95 to 98 and later turned out to [...]
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    Posted: May 24, 2007, 4:16pm EDT
    by Stephanie O'Keeffe

  • Budgeting our time

    Number of comments: 2
    Things got underway late, you know, what with the bomb scare and all.

    You didn’t hear about that?

    Apparently, at the end of the school day, there was some kind of bomb report/rumor at the Middle School, and such things aren’t taken lightly these days. Emergency people were [...]
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    Posted: May 22, 2007, 5:13pm EDT
    by Stephanie O'Keeffe

  • Fussbudget

    Number of comments: 0
    Imagine a young person just out of college: first job, shoebox apartment, eating a lot of rice as she tries to make the entry-level salary cover life’s start-up costs. Now imagine her mom, worried and well-intentioned, deciding that the stress of it all is not good for the daughter, so [...]
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    Posted: May 21, 2007, 9:23am EDT
    by Stephanie O'Keeffe

  • With apologies to the Bard

    Number of comments: 11
    This session was much ado about nothing.

    We started with a Special Town Meeting to again fix the Olympia Drive issue regarding which parcel is to be developed for affordable housing and which parcel is to be conservation land. We did this in the fall too, but because the [...]
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    Posted: May 17, 2007, 5:49pm EDT
    by Stephanie O'Keeffe

  • Does make you wonder

    Number of comments: 12
    The theme of Thursday night’s session might have been “Things that are kind of screwy.”

    Among the Moderator’s first announcements: the tally vote cards all have Monday’s date on them, and the timer at the lectern that keeps track of each speaker’s time was out for repair. Hmmmm.

    [...]
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    Posted: May 12, 2007, 2:41am EDT
    by Stephanie O'Keeffe

  • Opening night

    Number of comments: 5

    And so we begin.

    Last night, the 248th Annual Town Meeting for Amherst got underway. Astonishingly, all Town Meeting seats are filled except one – a vacancy in Precinct 3. That is 239 regular TMers plus 14 ex-officio, for a total of 253. So our quorum is 127, which [...]

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    Posted: May 08, 2007, 3:26pm EDT
    by Stephanie O'Keeffe

  • Time flies

    Number of comments: 0
    Here we are again.

    I had hoped to freshen up the blog for a new year of Town Meeting, but that didn’t happen. Alas. Of course, we might well be meeting into July, so there’s still time.

    One change though is that this front page will now only [...]
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    Posted: May 07, 2007, 11:23pm EDT
    by Stephanie O'Keeffe

  • Prometheus bound

    Number of comments: 6
    We would finish last night. The question was when. We got started at about 7:45.

    Article 14 pertained to the Town acquiring an easement for land on Main Street where the parking garage encroaches on private property, but details are still being worked out with the land owner, and [...]
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    Posted: November 14, 2006, 10:36am EST
    by Stephanie O'Keeffe

  • Updated attendance and voting results

    Number of comments: 0
    The attendance and tally vote records have been updated to reflect the 11/8 session. They are sorted by name, by precinct, and by vote. [...]
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    Posted: November 11, 2006, 8:20pm EST
    by Stephanie O'Keeffe

  • A productive and drama-free evening

    Number of comments: 4
    Back to the business of the Town, rather than the World.

    To start the meeting, Anne Awad of the Select Board moved to put the remaining articles back in their numerical order, overriding the various rearrangements we made October 30th. The vote in support of the motion was unanimous.
    [...]
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    Posted: November 09, 2006, 9:53am EST
    by Stephanie O'Keeffe
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Stephanie's Town Meeting Experience

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