Weekly Roundup - Norwich News, for week ending March 2, 2013

Dresden Election Brochures Are MIA

Informational brochures about the election and annual meeting mailers were late going in the mail.  I guess the dog ate the memo. Read the brochure here. Valley News Staffer Sarah Brubeck reports about the annual  meeting in the story below.
Dresden Contracts Questioned
By Sarah Brubeck, Valley News Staff Writer
March 1, 2013
Hanover — The number of School Board members rivaled the number of attendees at last night’s annual meeting for the Dresden budget, and it might have been because people didn’t receive mailers announcing the meeting.
At the end of last night’s hour-long meeting, former School Board member Kari Asmus took to the microphone and criticized the board for not getting information out to voters in a timely fashion.
The School Board decided not to mail out annual reports to each household this year because they are expensive and many residents toss them aside.
Instead, annual reports are available at town halls, libraries and the SAU 70 office, and small informational mailers would be sent out.
When Asmus didn’t receive a mailer before last night’s meeting, she was a little taken aback. But she shrugged it off and said she thought, “Oh well. I can come to this meeting and learn what I need to learn.”
So she headed to Hanover High School, but to her surprise, the doors were locked. Without the mailer, she hadn’t realized that the meeting had been moved to Richmond Middle School.

Read the rest of the story.
LINKS:
http://www.sau70.org/budgets/13-14_budget/brochures/Dresden_Brochure.v3a.pdf
http://www.vnews.com/news/schools/4767060-95/board-contract-meeting-teachers

Opinion

Does democracy suffer when the Town Manager has an agenda? Is the ballot box an adequate remedy?
Column: Direct Democracy Is Struggling in Norwich and Other Towns
Watt Alexander, For the Valley News
February 26, 2013
“Practice makes perfect,” it’s often said, but surely not in reference to democracy. We’re clearly not getting any better at it.

The democratic debate over competing interests — from New England town meeting to state legislatures to the U.S. Congress — remains as fractious and messy as ever. Messier, maybe, as that democratic debate is increasingly filtered through a vast and growing bureaucratic layer of government administrative roles and regulation.

Indeed, throughout the Upper Valley, New England’s experiment with direct democracy is giving way to a more modern, suburban bureaucracy. More and more town meetings are replacing customary floor debates and votes with annual Australian ballots. Volunteer selectboards cede ever more authority to professional administrators, signaling that American government, even in small communities, may no longer be a matter for amateurs.

Here in Norwich, our experiment with professional administration began in 2002 when we hired our first town manager. Barely 10 years later, convulsed by a series of public controversies, we’re on to our fourth town manager with new controversies brewing. While the details of these spats are fascinating to the participants — and make for good Valley News headlines — the underlying struggle they signify is relevant to all of your readers: Where do we, the amateur citizen-taxpayers, fit within this increasingly bureaucratized democracy?

Read the rest of the story.
LINK:
http://www.vnews.com/opinion/columns/4692948-95/town-democracy-manager-selectboard

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