We made some real progress tonight. We started by finishing the discussion about accessory apartments. I was glad to see both amendments, limiting the apartments to seniors and affordable housing, defeated. However, I was on the losing side of the defeat of the original article.
There was some excitement as Mr. Greeley took Mr. Loreti to task over comments he made regarding the Board of Selectmen. He had indicated that there was a culture of exchanging favors and downplaying proposals to change the bylaws. Mr. Greeley rose to defend the honor of the Selectmen, pointing a warning finger and shouting. What great fun!
There were many articles passed tonight to make minor changes to keep the bylaws up-to-date. We passed requiring recording of testimony in 40B hearings, normalizing the wording in the human resources regulations, remove the police chief from historic district enforcement, update outdated provisions, and normalizing the spelling of certain street names. We agreed to have newspaper bins re-certified each year to eliminate abandoned bins.
We voted "no action" on several articles. This happens when there is no approved language to put forward on an article. Those articles dealt with submission of meeting minutes, adopting electronic voting immediately, allowing second water meters, allowing evening off-leash dog hours in parks, and establishing a building maintenance committee.
We also discussed several articles regarding the operation of Town Meeting. We agreed to keep the starting time of 8:00pm. I preferred to keep the speaking limit of 10 minutes, but the meeting voted to reduce the time to 7 minutes. We also agreed to form a committee to investigate electronic voting at Town Meeting.
We voted to table or postpone several articles as well. We tabled the article on municipal liens for school fees. We postponed discussions regarding leaf blowers, the disposition of the Gibbs School, and setting an interest rate for property tax deferrals.
Our final act of the night was to change the qualifications for property tax deferrals. The current procedure of having a fixed rate was changed in favor of adopting the state "circuit-breaker" limits. We almost didn't vote, because a motion to adjourn was presented right at 11:00. However, the moderator indicated there was only one speaker left on the list. The motion to dismiss was voted down, the last speaker passed, the article was adopted, and we adjourned - all within a couple of minutes.
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