Town Meeting Season: It’s a Wrap

The last votes have been tallied and the results are clear: Vineyard voters do not want a roundabout in the middle of the Island.

In Edgartown, West Tisbury, Chilmark, Vineyard Haven and this week Aquinnah, where a nonbinding question about the roundabout appeared on the annual town election ballot, sentiment has run three to one against the construction project planned for the blinker intersection in Oak Bluffs. Only in Oak Bluffs itself, where the question did not appear on the ballot, did voters endorse the roundabout on a voice vote, with no discussion, at town meeting.

It would be easy to dismiss the resoundingly negative reaction to the project if, as is often the case, voters were equally hostile to other referendum questions. Conventional wisdom has it that voters tend to vote no on ballot questions, especially when spending is involved (although actual research on that point is mixed).

But that is hardly the picture on the Vineyard this year.

This week, voters in Aquinnah supported four ballot questions that will result in spending beyond the limits of the state-mandated property tax cap, and said no to one thing: the roundabout. Even in Tisbury, where last month at their annual town election voters rejected all three ballot questions before them, far more people voted in favor of the questions with price tags attached than those who voted yes on the nonbinding roundabout question. For example, the $3 million connector road question that ultimately failed saw 492 voters say yes, and a cost of living adjustment for town workers that ultimately failed saw 458 voters says yes. By contrast there were just 215 voters in Tisbury who thought the Island should build a roundabout at the blinker intersection of Barnes and Edgartown-Vineyard Haven Road.

And at their town meetings in general this year, Vineyard voters were anything but disapproving. Not one but two major library projects, in Edgartown and West Tisbury, were strongly endorsed. Thrifty Chilmarkers passed an 8.6 per cent budget hike and Aquinnah town administrator Adam Wilson got a hefty if well deserved 16 per cent raise. Even Oak Bluffs voters, who had no ballot questions to consider, passed every spending measure before them at town meeting.

Islandwide, the picture that emerges from town meeting season is of an informed, forward-thinking and discriminating electorate that cares very much about what happens on this Island. Through all six town meetings come the voices of citizens who are cautious but willing to spend money to research pond pollution, educate our children, repair roads when needed, ensure public safety, conserve land, preserve historic buildings and occasionally to buck tradition, as they did in West Tisbury in approving the sale of beer and wine in restaurants.

We are not endorsing government by plebiscite, and officials responsible for the roundabout are of course free to ignore what is legally nothing more than a voter opinion poll. But there’s a clear message here if the Island’s leadership chooses to listen.

This article appears in May 11, 2012.