Henniker Town Meeting is going to be held Saturday, June 6, with voters broken up into small groups in separate rooms at the Henniker Community School, participating via a live feed.
Details are still being worked out as officials face complicated questions such as how to balance the need for health and safety in the COVID-19 era with the need for open democracy.
“I’d be nervous about saying you can’t attend town meeting until we take your temperature,” said Moderator Cordell Johnson during a board of selectmen’s meeting May 27, responding to questions.
Similarly, masks will be encouraged but probably not required for registered town voters to attend.
“There’s no way we’re going to be able to do this town meeting with zero risk … I think we’ve taken enough steps here to mitigate as much as we possibly can; I say that we go for it,” said Select Board chair Kris Blomback.
Towns and school districts that didn’t get their annual meeting done before the stay-at-home order was issued in March have been inventing alternatives to the traditional method of gathering hundreds of people in a gymnasium or auditorium for hours at a time.
Hopkinton and Bow school districts have held drive-up voting in which people discuss articles online over the course of a week and then vote on ballots outside the local school. Henniker’s system will be radically different.
Under the plan, details of which will be finished at a selectmen’s meeting Tuesday night, voters will assemble at Henniker Community School at 1 p.m. on Saturday. They will enter through one of three entrances depending on the alphabet, given warrants and escorted to a classroom on the second floor.
Each room will have at most eight voters plus one assistant moderator.
Selectmen and other officials will hold the town meeting in the school library. It will be piped via live feed to each room so that residents can watch, listen, and ask questions. The feed will probably be inside the building only and not fed to the internet.
It’s not clear whether the entire warrant, which has more than 30 articles, will be taken up. Priority will be given to the most important items, notable operating budgets for the town, library, water and wastewater plants.
The proposal will require even more volunteers than is usual to make town meeting run. Complicating the issue is the fact that such volunteers are often retired people or those who have lived in town many years, meaning they are older and more vulnerable to the novel coronavirus, which may make them more nervous about attending, officials said.
(David Brooks can be reached at 369-3313 or dbrooks@cmonitor.com or on Twitter @GraniteGeek.)
