To the editor:
The 2023 Town Meeting vote to extend the terms on the Select Board to three-year staggered terms passed by a small 17-vote majority on the third night of Town Meeting. There was very little debate on this issue at Town Meeting and very little consideration given to the divided vote before it was recently approved by the state legislature in the town’s home rule petition.
There are several primary arguments advanced by the proponents of the three-year staggered terms:
1. Select Board members need three years to pay full attention to town affairs and not be distracted by annual elections. False. Most incumbent board members under one-year terms do very little campaigning, and if they do, it is usually one month to two weeks before election day – hardly a year-long distraction or big expense. The reason for that is that election results are generally a performance report of incumbents over the year.
2. Staggered terms allow the town to focus on evaluating one (or two) new candidate challenger(s) when incumbent terms expire. False. There is not much evidence that staggered terms would allow a better vetting of either incumbents or new candidates. Rather than extensive campaigns, incumbents in one-year terms rely on evidence of their recent work for reelection. New candidates under one-year terms do require more campaign efforts than incumbents, but they are less likely to conduct negative campaigning against a targeted opponent and more likely focus on how they might bring positive contributions to the table. In this situation, new candidates have a clear advantage if they can point to a track record of prior town volunteer experience.
3. Staggered three year-terms give Select Board members time to learn. Maybe, but it also gives new members time to coast. The one-year terms, by contrast, place more urgent incentives on new candidates to collaborate and learn from incumbents. Annual voter evaluation of the board encourages incumbent members to be inclusive and help new members. Simultaneously, new candidates are incentivized to gain prior knowledge of the town, typically through volunteer work, so they can visibly get up to speed quickly with the help of other members of the board.
4. Staggered terms ensure more board stability. False. The Select Board has remained stable and resilient under one-year terms for 376 years, because voters place a premium on continuity when the Board is effective and place a premium on flexibility when the Board is not working well.
5. Staggered terms ensure more power relative to the other board and committees in town. False. As suggested in the 1989 Cresap Report, the fear that the Select Board would lose its effectiveness relative to other town committees has not materialized mainly because the Select Board’s powers are clearly established by statute. Also, the board appointed the first town administrator in 1994, providing much needed centralized efficiencies as the board’s chief operating designee and allowing the board to focus on more strategic issues such as policy, planning, volunteer appointments, and hiring the town administrator.
6. Everyone else is doing it, so Marblehead should do it too. This is the least compelling claim, because staggered terms have not helped improve governance or crucial staff retention in other towns or on other committees in Marblehead.
The core argument for one-year terms is accountability to voters. The Select Board deserves special voter oversight because it acts as a unique trust – directly accountable to the voters for its fiduciary work, particularly the setting of the town budget – in ways that other boards are not.
By giving voters timely control and more power over the entire board, voters also create a set of incentives which encourages fiduciary behavior by the Select Board:
- Voter concerns are top of mind for individual board members all year long because members are given a vote tally performance report at the end of each year.
- Voters create consistent incentives to debate disagreements civilly and collaboratively because voters evaluate the entire board collectively.
- Voters have little tolerance for dysfunction and vote accordingly because it does not take long for dysfunctional boards or committees to wreak havoc on the institutions they are leading.
- Voters have a built-in recall mechanism with one-year terms, allowing them to vote out members promptly if needed without the reputation destruction, cost, divisiveness, partisan weaponization, and distraction of traditional recall petitions.
- Voter scrutiny creates strong incentives for the board to focus on practical business and deliberation during the year — and to be less concerned about political posturing on social media etc. — which is why the board has always had members of widely diverse political persuasions and temperaments working well together for the common good in their areas of interest and advocacy.
Article 49 is being sponsored by seven former Select Board members and two existing board members with several generations of direct experience.
They are unified in the belief that the Select Board remains a prime example of our founders’ experiment in volunteer governance — government “by the people, for the people” in its purest form at the municipal level.
The basic premise is that volunteers are better entrusted to town government oversight because they are more likely to be more dispassionate, truthful, and responsive to their voters. One-year terms are in strong practical alignment with this aspiration, which has withstood the test of time in Marblehead.
Marblehead’s Select Board members have faithfully understood that submitting themselves to more intensive annual voter oversight is well worth the flexibility and safeguards preserving our form of highly engaged civil democracy.
Dwight Grader