Publisher’s Note: Thoughtful new article from Seven Days’ Kevin Kelley on possible futures for the Vermont town meeting, with many of  Vermont’s most astute decentralists – John McClaughry, Frank Bryan, and Susan Clark among them – all weighing in. Watch our Plan V-TV interview with Susan Clark here, and read Kelley’s excerpted piece below. Most importantly, invest in Vermont town meeting!

Susan Clark, coauthor with Bryan of All Those in Favor: Rediscovering the Secrets of Town Meeting and Community,” agrees that the town meeting in Vermont is generally “in decline.” She emphasized, however, that participation varies greatly from town to town and that “the spirit of direct democracy that animates town meeting in Vermont is very much alive.” Clark rates Vermont’s town meetings as the most vibrant in New England, followed by those of Maine and New Hampshire. The annual conclaves are still significant events in some Massachusetts towns, Clark added, but are less robust in Connecticut and Rhode Island.

Averill Leslie, a Hardwick native writing a PhD dissertation at the University of Chicago on town meeting democracy in New England, points out that worries about the allegedly sorry state of Vermont’s town meeting began not long after Bennington held the first such assembly in 1762. “It’s important to distinguish between town meeting changing versus town meeting dying,” Leslie wrote in an email.

Some years, some town meetings do attract sizable crowds, involve impassioned debates and even generate national headlines. In 1982, for example, a call for a freeze on the number of U.S. and Soviet nuclear weapons won the support of 155 of the 185 Vermont towns that considered the question. Such a huge grassroots majority urging a sharp shift in president Ronald Reagan’s administration policy caught the attention of media outlets in Washington and New York.

There’s speculation now that the upsurge in citizen activism triggered by Donald Trump’s presidency may reenergize town meeting. The turnout this year in Kirby was higher than average, according to McClaughry, who said only about 40 voters typically attend.

Another sign of renewed life: A few Vermont towns debated on Tuesday whether to declare themselves sanctuary communities in defiance of Trump’s crackdown on unauthorized immigrants.

Such efforts to address national or even global issues at citizen assemblies “invigorate the local meetings and help to continue their relevance,” suggested Tom Slayton, editor emeritus of Vermont Life magazine. “They will help keep town meetings vital into the future, even as more and more of the traditional functions of such meetings are gradually taken over by the State of Vermont or the feds.”

Scholars who have focused on town meeting in Vermont are in general agreement that statewide participation rates are dropping — precipitously in some cases. Bryan has estimated, for example, that attendance at town meetings statewide averaged about 20 percent of registered voters in the period from 1970 to 1998. By 1999, he calculated, the rate had plunged to 11 percent.