[Waterbaby]

Originally Posted by fatlazyless

Take a look at the voting held at the town hall meetings which occur on the second Tuesday night in March, at about eleven - midnight, after a long three-four hour meeting, and you will quickly see that the voter turn-out is drastically diminished. The overall voter numbers is much, much, smaller than in the presidential election.

Many Meredith voters simply chose not to go to the annual town meeting. Why is that? Well, you would have to ask each individual voter. But, it is safe to say that the overall electorate is heavy with older people.

Do you attend Town Meeting, FLL? I ask because your paragraph about when the voting actually takes place is a little distorted, IMO. First of all, NH statutes* require that all MONEY items be on the warrant first, before any amendments to town regulations and general warrant articles. Therefore, usually the general operating budget is article one, capital-expenditure requests (as in new fire equipment), etc., follow. Second of all, after the warrant article is read and followed by discussion, voting on that article takes place before moving on to the next article on the warrant. Anyone not familiar with the way town meeting in NH works -- be it the old-style town meeting or an SB-2 town -- would think that no voting takes place at all until late at night, according to your statement above, when this is not the case. Don't get me wrong, I realize sometimes discussions on a particular article can become very heated and go on and on before a vote is taken, but this is not the rule.

As far as your second paragraph quoted above, regarding older people -- I don't understand what you are saying. Do the "older people" not attend town meeting because they need to go to bed early, or are they the majority of the attendees because they don't need as much sleep or are retired so can stay up later than the general population? Thanks for your anticipated clarification!

*If I had the RSA numbers handy I would quote them; I am just speaking from personal experience. Ya'll should have seen the first warrant I did for my town when I worked for the town, not being aware of proper form -- I just put the articles on there as they came in.............. luckily I was corrected prior to it being published!