Terry Cowgill

The Mother of All Meetings

May 4, 2008 on 4:17 pm | In Local |

No, the headline of this post is no exaggeration. I’d say Friday’s town meeting in Salisbury was easily the most crowded and eventful I have seen since I started writing about the town more than three years ago.

On a personal and professional level, it was also a first for me. Since wi-fi was working inside the Congregational Church, I live-blogged the event (see the post below this one) and took notes for a news story for this week’s print edition as well.

I’ve heard from several people who said they appreciated that approach. One of them walked up to me Saturday in the Stop & Shop and said she was out for dinner Friday night and unable to attend, but wanted to know what the verdict was. She was delighted to be able to learn about here it as soon as she got home.

As for the meeting itself, it went pretty much as I expected it to. It was passionate and well attended, attracting about 500 taxpayers. But the thing that has always amazed me is how few people usually turn out for town meetings and public hearings on routine budgets, but then fall all over themselves to come to meetings like this last one.

The town of Salisbury, for example, will hold a town meeting May 21 to approve the proposed town and local education budgets, which total $7.5 million. The Region One School District, which includes our regional high school, will hold a referendum Tuesday on a proposed budget of almost $14 million.

In Salisbury, perhaps a couple dozen people will vote on the annual town budget. And in Region One, they’re lucky to get 10% of eligible voters to weigh in on that huge sum of money. But try spending a relatively paltry $2 million to acquire a piece of property for a new transfer station and everybody and their grandmother (literally, in some cases) shows up to be part of the seething throng. Go figure …

I am convinced the opponents of the Luke-Fitting site are done yet. Here’s my shot-in-the-dark prediction and you heard it here first: The Belgo Road crowd will hire Michael Klemens, the Salisbury resident and eminent herpetologist, to scour the site for bog turtles, blue spotted salamanders and any other protected species they can find to derail the project. Then there will be expensive litigation that will double or triple the town’s line item for legal fees.

As Bill O’Reilly would ask with faux humility, “Am I wrong? I’ll give you the last word … “