by Steve MacDonald
One of the symptoms of a legislator who has lost touch with their role in government is when they sponsor or vote for legislation that dilutes voter power or their ability influence the process. HB 1142 deigns to do exactly that.
Peter Bergin and Shannon Chandley, both of Amherst, have sponsored a bill that would change the current minimum petition committee size from 25 people to 2% of the towns population.
But let’s clear this up first…
The Union leader report is misleading. They write that only 25 signatures are needed to get a warrant on the ballot. This is wrong. Twentyfive signatures are needed just to form a petition committee which must then obtain the signatures of 10% of all registered voters in town to get the warrant on the ballot. If you can’t even form a committee, the warrant is dead long before arrival. And that arrival is critical to local involvement and the distributive nature of political power at the town level.
Town and City councils can control what goes on the ballot in the towns that have a town council form of government. So you can add a warrant by simply asking the town council to do so but the council is under no obligation to add it. This is the veto power of the council–acting as the elected chief executive body–for the very purpose of preventing frivolous legislation from being added ad-hock to any ballot. If a majority of council members objects, the warrant is essentially vetoed and will not come before the town unless the warrants sponsors pursue other avenues.
Why should that matter? In town government, the residents are technically the legislature, the council the elected chief executive. So the only veto override power they have–short of waiting to vote out town councilors they may only disagree with on one important issue (and which would take years to accomplish if at all) is the petition process. This process allows some number of residents to form a petition committee which must then collect hundred or thousands of signatures just to get the measure before the voting public. Once before the public, the town then has it’s only opportunity to accept the measure, effectively overriding the veto of the town council.
So to override (or even bypass) the council, you must have the will to formulate a warrant, form a committee, and convince 10% of the towns voting body to share your interest just to get it to a town wide vote, with no guarantee that it will pass. And it is entirely up to that petition committee to promote or defend it until the next scheduled town vote.
Bergin and Chandley must either think that’s too much power for you to handle responsibly, or have some other motivation.
Diluting the power of the town veto will discourage residents from taking up local causes in defense of the towns right to vote on them. It will dissuade people from bringing ideas before the voters. It will complicate the process of presenting opposition to an elected council that may be unwilling or unable to address an important issue that does not appear to them to be a priority at the time. And it does two other things that may be more important. It favors town power brokers, union contracted employees and organizations, and others more able to organize and affect change over that of less connected taxpayers with an equal financial stake but no preexisting power base with which to organize a committee. It also–by default–elevates the legislative process to the next level of government moving power away from the people. Local issues must now become state wide issues, as people who can not or do not want to be bothered with the local process, seek a shorter path with a more sweeping remedy by soliciting state level government. This can either make a local problem everyone’s problem, or kill a good idea in its tracks. And much like the federal government overriding states, it reduces the number of test labs for policies that might later prove beneficial to others, or those that pass but fail miserably to produce desired results. Then again, some towns will never need some rules at all and should be free to avoid them and top down mandates from the state.
Even now the push for state wide rules continues to escalate every year as the “do something mentality” shifts state wide, producing over 1,000 new bills in every legislative session.
So could HB 1142 be a manufactured effort to drive more power upward and away from local control? Whatever the driver, this is bad.
Intentionally or otherwise, that is exactly what will happen. People will have to rely more on Concord than on themselves.
We need to change the political culture.
Elected officials should, at every available opportunity, vote to secure government power within its lowest common denominator. That would be to favor the people first starting with individuals, then families, then communities. Any law that makes local action more tedious or complex only serves to keep people from getting involved in the process. And any legislator who is not doing their best to make the process easier, is advancing something other than the defense of your liberty and your ability to affect your own government.
And it is always better to err on the side of liberty than to accumulate power away from the people no matter what the inconvenience.
So Reps Bergin And Chandley–and by all accounts the Amherst community treasurer who is supposed to have asked for the change–are looking to make it more difficult for voters to affect local change.
It should also not go unnoticed, that the number of petition committee members only recently went from 5 to 25 in 2008 on the same grounds. To keep locals from affecting change to the government they are paying for.
No hearing date has been set for this Bill. But for the sake of convenience, perhaps Rep Chandley will pull the bill so we don’t all have to drive to Concord to explain to our elected State officials what their role is in regard to local government.
The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on certain occasions, that I wish it to be always kept alive. It will often be exercised when wrong, but better so than not to be exercised at all. I like a little rebellion now and then. It is like a storm in the atmosphere.
– Thomas Jefferson