Arlington Town Meeting

I would like to thank my fellow Town Meeting Members for tonight electing me as their Assistant Moderator.

Thank you!

In a most excellent development, the Town is posting final Town Meeting votes in their entirety — in other words, showing the motion under each article that Town Meeting ultimately approved, including all amendments made on the floor. This is a great resource.

A bunch of reports to the 2007 Annual Town Meeting are now available:

• The report of the Selectmen
• The report of the Redevelopment Board
• The report of the Zoning By-Law Review Committee

As you may have heard/noticed, I’m running for Moderator.

It’s not too late to help, and just some of the ways you can help are:

• Holding signs.
• Displaying yard signs
• Making endorsements
• Telling friends and neighbors you support me.
• Making contributions to defray campaign costs.

If you’re interested in any of these or have any questions about what you can do to help, send an email to volunteer@richformoderator.org. If you have any general questions, email rich@richformoderator.org.

Thank you, and please vote for me on April 14th!

Here’s a link to a PDF of the statement distributed to the TM Announce list last week.

Vision 2020 has released a worksheet where you can plug in the assessed value of your property and see what your tax is and how the town spends it. The worksheet, which is an Excel spreadsheet, is available here.

The report of the Capital Planning Committee to the annual meeting is available here.

FinComm has released the FY07 budget document, which is available here.

And SchoolComm has (previously) released the FY07 school budget document, which is available here.

Finally, the Town Manager’s FY07 financial plan is available here.

The 2006 Annual Town Meeting of the Town of Arlington starts tomorrow, 24 April, at 20:00 in Town Hall. It will be preceded by BOS Chair Kevin Greeley’s “State of the Town” address at 19:00.

On the other hand, a reading of the Town Manager Act might indicate that the Annual Town Meeting actually started on the day of the Town Election and that what starts tomorrow is merely the part of TM that TMMs can exclusive act on. The Act talks about how the Town as a whole will determine the various elected officers and that the TMMs are the only ones who can act on all the other articles. To me, that implies that TM has already begun, as article(s) in the warrant (the election one(s)) have already been acted on.

Related to that, the Town Manager Act also says that nothing in it abridges the voters’ (state) constitutional right to have “general meetings”. So what does that mean? Is there still some way for an old-fashioned Open Town Meeting to be called? How would that happen? If anyone knows, I’d love to hear the answer.

The Traffic Rules & Orders (which are promulgated by the Board of Selectmen in its capacity as the Traffic Commissioner of the Town) are available here. As always, if you need to be certain of something, go to the Selectmen’s office and ask to see the official copy.

The Town’s zoning by-laws are available here. This copy (which is on the Town’s website) is as of December 2004. If you want to see the up-to-date ones, go to the office of the Planning Department.

The Town by-Laws are available here. Keep in mind that what’s posted isn’t official and that I and others have found errors in the posted by-laws in the past. If you want or need to be 100% sure, go to the Town Clerk’s office and look at an official, printed copy of the by-laws.

A on-line viewable version of the 2006 Annual Meeting warrant is available here.

The ARB report (redone as a PDF by me) is now available. The original Word document is available here.