Surely Tuesday night’s Tisbury special town meeting, which finally saw police pay raises approved, set some kind of record for discomfort, noise and brevity.

From the time town moderator Deborah Medders called the meeting to order until the time she declared it over, it took just 17 minutes.

And it could have been a lot shorter, but for some last-minute amending of one motion by the selectmen, and a number of some utterly unnecessary speaking to the articles by the selectmen — little speeches that were, in any case, only sporadically audible over the roar of the fans which fought a losing battle to cool the Tisbury school gym on the hottest day in June.

The fact is, those who gathered in the sweltering evening needed no encouragement. They just wanted to pass motions before they passed out from the heat.

But the selectmen, understandably, did not want to leave anything to chance, given that this was their second attempt to gain approval to pay the $225,000 in police pay increases, due under the terms of a collective bargaining agreement resulting from a Joint Labor Management Committee arbitration award, agreed to by both the town officials and the police union.

The proposal was approved by the 183 people who turned up for the annual town meeting in April, but when it went to the broader electorate as a ballot question at the town elections, it was defeated 934 to 606.

At that time, the selectmen proposed to fund the pay increases by way of a budget override, meaning money would come by way of an increase in property taxes.

This time around, they opted to fund it out of existing town reserves.

That increased the chances of passage for two reasons: first, obviously, because it meant taxes would not rise, and second because it had already been established that those who took the bother to attend town meetings were more inclined to pay up than was the broader populace who would vote in a ballot.

The major fear of town officials going into the meeting was not opposition but apathy — that the meeting would not get the 100 residents necessary to form a quorum.

So there was a deal of nervousness being expressed as 7 p.m. approached, and they were still a couple of dozen people short.

But 10 minutes after the appointed hour, Ms. Medders announced there were 104 people in the room. Another dozen or so turned up before the votes were taken.

The moderator first asked if she could be heard over the noise of the fans, and made a joke reference to the vuvuzelas at the World Cup.

Then she read the first article — which had been amended from the way it was printed on the warrant to correct some dates — and called on the chairman of the board, Jeff Kristal, to speak.

Then there was a hiatus of several minutes, as he conferred with his fellow selectmen and town officials including the finance director, Tim McLean. They proposed a second amendment to the article. It formerly said “to see if the town will vote to raise and appropriate the sum of $125,000 to fund the retroactive portion of the police union contract . . .” The amended version struck out the words “raise and,” and added other words, so it read “vote to appropriate and transfer from the unreserved funds balance, $125,000 to fund” et cetera.

Thus it made clear the money was coming from the town’s free cash, and not from a tax rise.

At 7:18 the amendment was put to a vote. There was loud, unanimous support.

Then Mr. Kristal spoke, thanking people for turning up, apologizing for the necessity of the meeting, and accepting blame for the selectmen’s failure to educate people about the importance of the expenditure.

After him, selectman Geoghan Coogan gave a brief history of the pay negotiations with the police union, which had bogged down over three years, had ultimately gone to arbitration and which had now come to an agreement everyone believed was fair to both the cops and the town.

The next speaker was Margaret Wolontis, an inveterate contributor to town meeting debate. She was not happy with the way the town had handled the issue. The flow of her rhetoric was largely drowned out by the fans, but occasional words came through, like “sneaky.”

And she had a point. Why did the selectmen not take this course in the first place?

Well, according to Mr. Coogan, in a piece written for this paper last week, it was only after the ballot question failed, during discussions with the police union and the town’s number crunchers, that the town discovered “viable funding alternatives.”

There were only a couple of other speakers, both very brief and quite inaudible, before the third selectman, Tristan Israel, took his turn to urge a yes vote.

At 7:27 p.m., the vote was called. The ayes were unanimous.

For the second article, which proposed paying out of the town stabilization fund the other $100,000 owed to the police, for the coming fiscal year, there was only one speaker. It was Mr. Coogan again, and he warned that without the money the town would have to lay off its extra summer police.

Article two took one minute, from reading to passage. It also was unanimous.

But the loudest unanimous vote of the night was the next one, when Ms. Medders put the motion to dissolve the meeting. The crowd just wanted to be out of there, before they themselves dissolved.