Talk Elections

My Super Tuesday precinct, Precinct 3 of Amherst, had twenty voters, including me, filtering into the Immanuel Lutheran Church in North Amherst over the span of about ten or eleven hours. The town votes eighty per cent Democratic and the precinct is mostly university students who don't bother (though I was surprised there weren't more than twenty on account of at least the Paul people); I stayed for about half an hour after voting because the old people running the precinct were lonely. I wrote in my mother for the Democratic Presidential primary, voted for the candidate for state committeeman who lives in Amherst rather than in Northampton, and voted for the whole slate of Democratic town office candidates except for that guy and his wife. I was also told that I could win election to the town meeting in my precinct with like two or three write-in votes. And one of my friends is also registered in this precinct.

I'm in. In a month's time it's very possible I'll be an elected official.

What exactly would you be doing in this position? I'm not very familiar with Massachusetts' town system.

It's like student council, but with adults and it's a town.

(More seriously, it's like a mini-parliament for a town, with between 50 and 240 members.  Some towns have open town meetings, which mean that anyone who shows up gets to be a member).

I'd attend a series of evening meetings in the late spring and early summer. I'd be voting on budget and by-law propositions from the professional, full-time parts of the town government (the select board, that I mentioned endorsing the entire Democratic slate for except the person I'd already voted for for something else and his wife), as well as petitions from the public. One of the petitions this year is a resolution that the Town of Amherst does not consider corporations persons beyond the strictest legal fiction sense; inevitably someone will argue that this is not a matter of local concern (the furthest right rhetoric ever gets here), at which point I will probably ask how it's not a matter of local concern that Bank of America is progressively buying out the university campus. I believe that 'purely symbolic' does not mean 'not germane to the community' in this case.

The town meeting system in Massachusetts isn't (usually) a direct democracy like it is in Vermont but it is very representative since Amherst has about fifteen thousand registered voters, maybe a couple thousand more, and there are 240 members of the town meeting. That's why turnout in the precincts that include the university is low enough that I can become one of the twenty-four Precinct 3 members on the basis of write-ins from a couple of my friends.

(I do, incidentally, intend to take this seriously if/when elected.)

Interesting. So is this like a level of government below the official city/town council or is it some kind of supplement/power-sharing agreement?

What happens if the town meeting opposes a town council ordinance or vice versa? Who has supremacy/veto power?

That's not actually "representative" at all if some random bloke can get elected by getting his girlfriend/boyfriend to vote for him.

Think of it as the select board being the executive and the town meeting being the legislature. The town meeting can veto select board propositions but most of what originates from the town meeting is binding unless there's some sort of overwhelming reason why it just can't be done. If the town meeting doesn't do anything in some area then the work of the select board just carries over from the previous year.


Clearly. The immensely low turnout in Precincts 2, 3, and 9 is actually in my opinion a huge problem. I don't want to be able to be elected to the town meeting by being asked by desperate precinct operators and pestering a couple of my friends. I'm still going to take advantage of the fact that I am because unlike seemingly all of the other gownies I care a lot about the town but if I can make it so that this won't keep happening then I will.

Will you tell us your exact swearing in date (or close as possible) so we can keep an accurate record of your political career? I think this makes like three people to hold positions other than things like delegate.

If elected I promise to keep the Forum Community board regularly updated on my service and on local politics in general (assuming anybody here is interested in the way smallish college towns in New England govern themselves except those of us who live in them).

Election is April 3,  the town is given some indication as to who is going to be in the town meeting on April 10 (I'll probably be notified before then if I get on it), and the first actual, well, meeting is April 30, which I imagine is when I'll be sworn in (or equivalent).

Town Clerk Sandra J. Burgess is pleased to inform me that I received a sufficient number of write-in votes at the April 3, 2012 Annual Town Election to elect me to town meeting for a one year term in Precinct 3. I'm to respond in writing by Friday. I've indicated my acceptance on the attached memo and will try to be bringing it down to town hall on the morrow.

It may be "cheap", but it's still pretty freaking cool IMHO.  Congrats.

As with anyone here who gains any sort of power, I ask that you use whatever influence you have to promote the values of the Atlas forum to the fullest extent of your position.

As Dead0man says, congratulations!

but he said he cares about his town :P

Nathan for President!

Congratulations, Nathan. :)

I trust you will exploit your position to further the aims of the Atlas, one forum under Leip, hallelujah, hallelujah.

PS: Can you hook me up with free cranberries? They're for a friend. PM me.

Welcome to the world of public office!

I'm told I'm the youngest person to hold public office at any level in Massachusetts in some time, which is also exciting.

Oakvale, I'll see what I can do. I'm at the other end of the Commonwealth from the bogs, but we've got a lot of apple orchards and dairy farms if that helps, and I'm sure I can make a trip to the East if it's for Atlas Forum.

Congrats!

How old are you?  You could be a congressman one day.  Somebody from this forum needs to become a member of Congress in the future.

The first Congressional election I'll be eligible in will be 2018. I'd actually like to stay in municipal politics for a while if I even do do anything political, but I've had the Massachusetts General Court pitched hard to future-me by people in the Pioneer Valley who are actually in it (mainly Stan Rosenberg), so that's a possibility. I'm not sure I'd like the exposure that would come with federal or statewide office.

Congrats!!!!!! Thats awesome Nathan! :)

Congratulations- you are a very kind and fair person and the type of person who SHOULD be elected

Clarence, Klecly, et al.: Thank you very much. I appreciate your kindness.

NVTownsend: Oh, there will be stories, I'm sure. We're arguing about corporate personhood this year. Inevitably somebody will argue that it's not germane to local issues, and a sh**tstorm will ensue.

Yeeha! We've really gotta get the atlas Super PAC TrueFedralist proposed underway. Congrats man.

We should form an Atlas Forum party, kinda like Americans Elect, in which we run two members for President/Vice President every four years.

That costs money. :P

Well what do people without money do when they need things?

They steal.

Atlas Forum Burglary Party

That's our party name.

And we will run Angus/Torie in 2012.

Congrats Nathan! :)

Angus/Torie? Single most respectable ticket in all of history.

You're only 19? I had no clue you were that young. Wow that means you weren't even able to vote for Obama in 2008...

It's because I started college when I was 15.

Yeah, I was a little cross since that was the first election I was really invested in (though I supported Kerry in 2004 because he was from New England and was not Bush, whom I already disliked).

Like you actually graduated or you just took some transferable college courses in high school?

I dropped out and took a GED and started college. I'm honestly not even sure why they let me.

WTF, that's possible? If it's that's like the biggest unexploited loophole ever...

Congratulations Nathan this is amazing!!!!

The problem, of course, is then you have to do college-level work, which is why my GPA went from 4.0 in 2007-8 to 2.9 in 2008-9 (though it's crawled back up to 3.4 since).

Thank you, Napoleon. I'll be sure to keep everyone informed of what goes on with this.

Wow -awesome news.  :)

I fully expect to see you in the Massachusetts legislature eventually -maybe even Congress by the time you reach your early 40s if not earlier. 

Very cool. :) Congratulations, Nathan!

It's certainly possible in California, although the test isn't the GED but a different test.

Awww I wanna start college now >:( I hate high school :(

Congratulations Nathan! I expect all of the Amherst, MA area's social ills to be cured by this time next year :P

Congrats Nathan. Every precinct has its own municipal legislator/councilperson?  How many of them are there in your town?  Is this true of every town in Mass, or just some?  If all, Boston must have a BIG city council. :)

Amherst has a representative town meeting form of government, essentially replacing the town meeting with a smaller body. Boston is a city and does not have a town meeting.

In any case congrats Nathan. Local government is a great way to learn retail politics and understand how a government functions. It's also a good way get to know your area's political players and decide if upward steps make sense.

Specifically, Amherst has ten precincts and twenty-four town meeting members per precinct.

Thank you very much, muon. I already know the daughter of the Town Moderator quite well (they're a branch of the Gregg family, of Judd fame, actually) and I hope to get to know more people involved in running the area.

And the adventure continues with my first Precinct Meeting (for 1 and 3; I'm in 3), where I meet such luminaries as Precinct 1's Louis and Hilda Greenbaum (both professors of history at my university, I think maybe former in Louis's case, who have been on Town Meeting almost every year for decades) and Precinct 3's Nancy Gregg (who is related to both the Town Moderator and one of my first friends when I arrived in the area--not the same person). We discussed, almost to exclusion, Article 25 of the 2012 Amherst Town Warrant, which would rezone North Amherst Village Center in such a way as to allow one Jones family to extensively develop a bunch of land that they own for purposes of tract housing and also make it easier for existing buildings, some of which date back to the 1730s, to be demolished for the same purpose. I, like everybody else there, oppose this, and gave my first public speech (at least, my first in this sort of context) explaining why I do even though I'm a university student and the tract housing is supposed to be there to be affordable for university students: I'm opposed to my university's practice of simply outsourcing its self-manufactured housing crisis to the town that surrounds it, which only serves to create a new housing crisis in the town that leads to bad remedies like this one. I spoke for about four or five minutes and it seemed pretty well-received, though they may have been going easy on me because I'm new.

Tomorrow is the first actual sitting of the Amherst Town Meeting. I've been asked to help present our case to the Town Moderator. Most of the Town of Amherst actually opposes this particular development but most wants 'development' generically constructed so it's a matter of whether or not we're able to convince at least a third of our colleagues from other precincts to join us in sending a message that we will hold out for something better that will not turn North Amherst into essentially suburbia of the city writ small that is the University of Massachusetts.

Good luck on the presentation, Nathan! :)

Thank you, Allen.

Fun fact: I have three entirely unrelated things to 'present' in varying contexts over the next two days. Got to love finals.

I get the impression this job would actually be pretty boring, it's hard to think of any hot button issues that would come up in Amherst. Mostly just dealing with resident complaints about road maintenance in their areas I bet.

But hey that first issue sounds worth fighting for, even if quite minor in the scheme of things.

There's actually a lot of zoning/development going on this year, most but certainly not all of which my traditionalist streak inclines me to oppose, as well as a nonbinding-to-protect-the-guilty order to the police department not to comply with certain areas of immigration policy (which order I haven't read yet).

But, no, no really huge drama at the local level here except for Article 25 and possibly parts of Article 26 (which I think does the same thing for Atkins Corner in South Amherst, I haven't read it all the way through just yet).

That reminds me of this local Minneapolis forum I found last year and lurked on and basically found to be nothing more than people who wanted a soapbox to rant and whine about very unimportant things, such as that huge thread where someone was throwing a fit about a check cashing place opened up near them and how the zoning laws don't prevent that (I've actually read Minneapolis zoning ordinances, and they basically amount to "Open whatever business you want as long as it's not in a tourist-filled area or neighborhood where most people actually own houses.") Now yeah those check cashing businesses are pretty shady and exploitative (similar to all those "loan" places that are pretty common on Lake Street), but the implications in how they are so bad because of the "types" they'd bring to the neighborhood is pretty disgusting, plus I'd wonder how much the residents of places like Jordan, Hawthorne and Phillips or any property owned by Spiros Zorbalas (http://www.citypages.com/2008-01-30/feature/the-slumlord-of-south-minneapolis) would love it if their biggest problem and the primary focus of their complaining was a check cashing business. But I suppose Amherst doesn't have any areas where drive by shootings are a monthly occurrence (or many check cashing businesses for that matter.)

Amherst doesn't have very much violent crime, no; the concern is more the noise levels that large student populations bring, which is genuinely problematic for many area families who live near student housing. That, and the simple fact of three-hundred-year-old buildings being allowed to get torn up for tract housing. There's a reactionary element to the rhetoric in my precinct but it's not vicious or malicious and I think it's understandable given how generally poorly thought out and deleterious to the community what's being proposed would be.

You are a cool and smart guy, Nathan, I would proudly vote for you. That comes from a guy who does not vote all that often.

Nathan, doing college level work as a teenager is...did all the other people in your classes look at you in disbelief?

Town Meeting was great up until we got to the annual budget (we accepted Town ownership of several new public works before that, and I took part in a genuinely interesting discussion about the sewage system. No lie). Even the library part of the budget wasn't at all bad. But as soon as we got to the elementary school budget something flipped in some people and--well, let me just say that I now have a greater understanding of who the krazens are, and it's not pretty. If it takes us this long to go through the rest of the budget I am not optimistic about our chances of getting to the zoning issue that really concerns me before I have to go home for a few weeks, and if I miss the debate on that and our side loses narrowly I'm going to be very angry at some people.

Me being who I am, this will I am sure just make me more committed to being a good Town Meeting member in the fall and into next year.

But aside from that, I met the Town Moderator again, as well as the Chairman of the Select Board, who's a lovely woman with a great sense of humor, and the Town Manager, who's a little stuffy but very lucid and helpful when Town Meeting members have questions. As soon as we get through this damnable budget I anticipate it becoming fun again, because we get to discuss things that interest me a lot, such as shade trees.

Ugh, sorry, I didn't even really want to get into what befell us on Wednesday.

Long story short, some of us tried to amend the town operating budget to restore a specific line item for Human Services. It was a really small amount of money relative to the whole budget but the actual amount wasn't why we cared; it was so that in the future this line item would be here so that we wouldn't have to rely on federal block grants for alms if we stopped having to. But then people started scaremongering about how 0.09% of the budget (about two dollars per capita per annum!) and it got voted down. It really upset me, more personally than I would have expected.

The vote was, however, narrower than expected considering opposition from the town committees, and I was one of the people who gave a podium speech in favor of it, which was the first time I've done something of the sort.

That is awesome man congrats!! I would have loved the chance to do something like this but I never really had my priorities in order. :(

Should we make Nathan wear one of those Harrison Bergeron devices so he doesn't take over the world by the time he's twenty-four? This is crazy.

Okay. Not much happened Monday, but tonight's the night where we have to deal with the articles proposing that really bad set of new development. Wish me luck. I'm out to SAVE AMHERST.jpg

We won. The first zoning package failed 130-78, the second 137-73 (a two-thirds majority was required, so these were really narrow votes).

I had to stay for three days longer than my academic and religious schedule would otherwise have called for to vote on the second package, during which time I couch-surfed with my political allies Janet Keller and Carol Gray. When it came time for the vote on Monday the way the debate was conducted was very blatantly lopsided; the Town Moderator at one point let the Town Manager keep talking for almost two minutes after his time was up, which would have been absolutely fine (the Town Manager, after all, deserves a certain measure of respect and deference, though we can argue about whether or not it's two minutes' worth) had he not explicitly decided to ignore a standing rule of Town Meeting while doing so. When I got up to speak I was disjointed, got ruled out of order for calling the way the debate was being run a snowjob, and called the Town Moderator unfair for gavelling me in the middle of a sentence. There was a shouting match of about five seconds and I was ordered to sit down.

We were convinced we'd lose the vote, and when we won by three votes there was such an immense relief and joy. A lot of people who had been concerned by the normally very fair-minded Town Moderator's behavior that night congratulated me (although everybody, including me, agreed that I need to work on toning it down a little at times like this), although I'm on his wife's sh**t-list now.

I took the train from Massachusetts to New Jersey yesterday to stay with my mother for the next few weeks and I'm finally on her couch with my cats right now. I made the Daily Hampshire Gazette for calling into question my university's decisions regarding how much off-campus housing to get itself involved in, how, why, and on whose behalf. It's actually the last line of the article on Monday's Town Meeting. I'm done with this now until the fall, although I'll probably want to just spend time with some of my political allies off-season when I'm back up there in June.

This sounds fascinating. If only the tiny hamlet of Springfield Township adopted this system of government & let 16 year olds participate. :)

You'd probably have Open Town Meeting if you were a tiny hamlet in Massachusetts, in which case you wouldn't even need to be elected.

ETA: Five thousand people is a tiny hamlet to you?! Wow, I grew up in a really rural area...

Ha, 5000 people in my home state would be considered an notable city. There are only twelve in the entire state with more than 5000.

New England local democracy is so...quaint.

Again, Nathan, I fear for our safety.


Seriously, though, congratulations on the win! Unfortunate that you've made an enemy of the Moderator's wife - hopefully she isn't some kind of Lady Macbeth figure that will cause some kind of incident in the future which could ultimately lead to your political destruction. ;)

EDIT: Wow, that's a really rambling incoherent post I made. I've been up all night and my right eye is twitching.

I'm amazed that you're apparently such a forceful speaker in actual real-life politics, yet in Atlasia you never seemed to stand out in the Senate at all. :P

The Atlasian Senate was not, in the final analysis, a forum to which I was particularly well-suited.


She'll probably forget about it within days if she hasn't already.

Last month I found out that people were talking sh**t about me on the Internet back in May because of the vituperative nature of some of my denunciations of the process used at the 254th Amherst Town Meeting. I had a minor nervous breakdown about this, particularly as it appeared they had stalked my mother on Facebook for some reason (my mother herself was unconcerned, mainly because my mother is the only five-foot-three white-collar Italian-American woman with white hair and severe arthritis I've ever met who has street cred). Among other things they said that I was only doing well in college because I'm a leftist hack, which Winfield has also called me in recent days. When Winfield said this it made me feel a lot less bad about when these other people did.

Today was the Precincts 1 and 3 precinct meeting for the Special Town Meeting for 2012, concerning a bunch of zoning articles aimed at making it harder to use single-family residences for things other than single families. Normally I would have concerns about this but I got my bike stolen near the frat houses a couple of months ago and have heard many other horror stories as well as ambulances going by for alcohol poisoning at all hours on Friday and Saturday nights so I support these efforts.

I talked to a few of the other people from my precinct and the one north of it before and after the meeting, and they all had more or less the same advice: Be completely unapologetic and don't even bring up the events of the spring, hope that everybody else will do the same, and if they don't it'll be them who end up looking like dicks. Personally I think they already look like dicks for Facebook-stalking my mom, but whatever.

The Special Town Meeting is on Monday evening and I don't plan to say much unless something really egregious happens. I'll let the Atlas Forum know if anything does, and of course I'll keep everybody abreast of the results.

Also, my mom wants me to intern for Elizabeth Warren either this coming summer or the one after, and I'm up for it, assuming it doesn't interfere with planned travel in East Asia. Apparently she has some angle for how we might make this happen, and I'm inclined to believe that she can get it done.

Hoo boy. Elizabeth Warren. :P Well bust of luck with your precinct meeting & trips & whatnot.

One of the Massachusetts Congressmen could work if the Atlas Forum would approve of that better.

I don't have much else to do until Monday (other than homework and such obviously), but that might be mildly interesting when it comes.

!!! Very impressive! UMass Amherst or the college? Also, don't worry if people talk sh**t about you. It means you're getting things done.

Bard; I transferred to UMass at 17 for a variety of reasons.

wtf, never knew this about you.  if you ever needed more encouragement to think of yourself at the other.. cannot be good for social development.  I was relatively young for my grades and was told it had effect on my experience, nothing like that, and I look older to begin with, now that I am old and downtrodden, alcoholic and overweight, long-since beat up.

Yeah, it's definitely taken a toll on me, and I'm still not sure and probably won't be for most of my life whether or not I'd really say it was worth it, but, you know, you make questionable life decisions and you learn how to deal with the consequences. I hope you do better too.

I won't fault you for working for her. Best to go whole-hog and get your state's US Senator instead of one of many Representatives.