A road peeved with good intentions

It is not a pretty sight when well-intentioned people make a grand mess of things, but that seems to be the case with the Town of Shelburne and their application to the Utilities and Review Board (URB) for a reduction of town councillors from seven to four, effective for the 2012 municipal election.  The issue, according to the Town's application to the URB was provoked by a recommendation made in sixteen months ago by a consulting firm hired by the Town for a governance study. It is a miracle that I even knew about the hearing, given the lengths to which both the Town and URB aseemed to go - albeit inadvertantly -  to make it difficult to get info about the hearing and arrange to testify.

When I got a heads up about a January hearing from a reader on December 22, I immediately went to the website for the Town for more information.... nothing... nada... zip... zero.  There were notices about events that happened in November and December (still there), but nothing about this hearing to change the structure of Town Council. When I finally located the calendar for the Town, I was sure I'd find ot there. Guess what? Still not there. Then I went to the Town offices to look for a notice of some sort.. (the official URB notice says you can see the notice there). Someone was finally able to confim the time and date of the hearing, but not much else. Back at the office, I went to the URB website, where they are supposed to post notices and exhibhits for all hearings. There were a couple dozen notices, but nothing, nada, zip, zero for Shelburne.

By the end of the day, a call there got me an email of the notice from the administrator, who also said she would add it to their web. She did. Too late in the day to do much about it then, I saw that the final day for registering to speak at the hearing was the next day. I sent an email to some friends and, by the deadline a whole four people had signed up to speak, maybe the only four who knew about the meeting. There was certainly no notice on the Town's web, or email note or other direct promotion by the Town of Council.

Now, my curiosity was peaked. Could it get any worse, I wondered? Of course it could. In reviewing the "exhibits" for the hearing - one of which was not on the URB site and had to be specially emailed - things began to unravel even more.  I saw that the reasoning behind the shrinking of the Council was 2010 report by Ramp-Up Consulting, which included a recommendation to reduce Council size. In May of 2010 - 10 months after the report - despite the advice of Ramp-Up, Council voted not to reduce their size. Four months later, they recersed tack and voted to apply to the URB for a recution. When the URB gets a request like this, re-organizing the structure of a Town, they want to know how much the citizens were involved or enaged and they replied to the Town, asking if the Town had "formally consulted with citizens" and if not, why not?

orAfter CorresponThe Ramp-Up consultant's governarecommendationreport of July 2010 made six recommendations After After All of this messiness about 

Let me repeat that all of the people at the Town and URB offices were quite nice and helpful and friendly. No malice, I think. But sometimes nice is not enough or even gets in the way of seeing where problems lie. Prominently dispayed at the top of the web site for the Town of Shelburne is the claim that it is a "full-servce community". Seems more like self-serve to me. 

towJuly, 201