If you think the resurgence of COVID-19 due to the Omicron variant has complicated your plans, be glad you don’t have to set up a town meeting.
“We’ve got another meeting next Thursday to discuss what we’re going to do. We’ll keep working on it,” said Dean Cascadden, superintendent of schools for SAU 67, which covers Bow and Dunbarton.
Bow’s annual meetings for school and town have been interesting in the pandemic era, to say the least, including the area’s first vote-from-your-car effort. The big complication, Cascadden said, is how to allow questions and comments from those people worried about COVID who don’t want to sit in the mask-optional meeting in the gymnasium.
“How can you have people participate two ways? It’s very easy to broadcast it one way, and very easy to vote while keeping people in those rooms, especially when it’s a ballot question … but how can you let them get to the microphone and speak?” he said.
Many towns and school districts aren’t even trying. The most common plan this year is to have a regular gathering for a deliberative session in SB2 towns and districts or an annual meeting in traditional communities, mask-optional. People who are leery of such a long indoor gathering can often watch and listen via YouTube or Facebook Live or some other platform, but they can’t ask questions or make comments unless they show up in person.
Unlike 2021 and 2020, there are no emergency orders or special legislation this year giving moderators leeway on how to run the meeting due to the pandemic.
“For the most part, town meetings will operate normally — or as normally as they can given the circumstances,” said Margaret Byrnes, director of the New Hampshire Municipal Association.
Bow thinks it can provide sufficient space in other classrooms with two-way video/audio connections to the main meeting, allowing those people to participate, but it’s not easy.
“The biggest thing in Bow we’re dealing with is that we haven’t been teaching remote this year, so our technology (isn’t set up). We kind of have to go back to the drawing board,” Cascadden said.
Why bother?
“Our moderators have been clear. We want to be careful that we don’t disenfranchise anyone with our COVID protocols,” he said. “We have a very complicated warrant this year. There will be a lot of debate and discussion. … Everybody should be able to participate if they wish.”
There is one other possibility, said Byrnes of the Municipal Association: Push back the meeting in hopes that the pandemic will ease.
She noted that RSA 39:2-a allows the select board to set the date for the business part of the meeting, covering the warrant and budget, although election day can’t move. “Any town wishing to use this approach must set and publish the future date of the business meeting when they post the warrant,” she said.
So far at least, it doesn’t appear that many communities are taking this option.
As for the pandemic itself, while some parts of the country are seeing new-case numbers fall on the far side of the Omicron surge, that hasn’t shown up to any extent in New Hampshire.
For coronavirus-related information and updates throughout the week, visit concordmonitor.com/coronavirus.
What’s the trend on the spread and impact of the disease? Bad, but at least it’s not getting worse
According to data from the state, the number of new cases reported daily has declined a bit in the past week but is still higher than at any point in the pandemic prior to this year. The situation is similar with hospitalizations, but not deaths. The number of deaths we’ve seen in the latest COVID-19 surge never quite hit the rate of January 2021, presumably because nursing homes and retirement homes, where the most vulnerable people live, are so well vaccinated.
But the number of deaths remains quite high and shows no sign of declining.
(David Brooks can be reached at 369-3313 or dbrooks@cmonitor.com or on Twitter @GraniteGeek.)
