What does and doesn’t make it to Town Meeting

Town Meeting time again in Wellfleet, that seasonal punctuation mark.

Being of a naively, even romantically, democratic bent I’ve always thought, without thinking a whole lot, that anything of importance to this town would get voted on by Town Meeting. I mean, that’s the whole purpose of Town Meeting government, right? To give people—all the people or at least all who care to show up —a chance to debate and vote whatever up or down.

So I was taken aback when it was looking like the Herring River Restoration, in the works now for years, was going to happen without ever being filtered by Town Meeting. What, really? The Herring River project proposes by removing a 1909 dike to restore natural tidal flow to a significant portion of our town. We vote on paving a road, a new fire truck, fireworks—and there won’t be a vote on this massive reshaping of our geography and future? Can that happen? For a while it looked like it could.

Turns out the restoration will be on the warrant, if indirectly, in two different warrant items, one a petitioned article to save High Toss Road, a 1000 feet of sand road that may be threatened by restored tidal flow.

But if Herring River had been restored without benefit of town meeting, it would not have been the first huge change to do so.

From having inquired, I gather that a surprising number of otherwise well-informed citizens of this town don’t know that until 1949, Route 6, ran right through the middle of downtown, as it still does through neighboring Eastham.

Aware of the drawbacks of Eastham’s bisection by a busy highway, perhaps we like to think how lucky we Wellfleetians are that our downtown lies off to one side.

Those who know that Route 6 used to run down Main Street and can’t imagine how we would deal with all that traffic may think: how clever of us to have decided to re-route the highway (and by implication, how lacking in foresight the Easthamites of the time).

But we don’t get the credit for this crucial transformation of our town. Bypassing downtown never went to Town Meeting. From having asked around I gather that downtown got bypassed as a result of the State’s program of straightening and modernizing the whole length of Route 6 (including bypassing all of the towns along current Route 6 A). Of course it probably didn’t seem so crucial at the time. In fact it’s easy to imagine that downtown merchants might have been miffed at his re-routing of potential customers. Had the issue gone to Town Meeting, that perceived loss might have won the day.

I’ve even heard people who ought to know better pat Wellfleeetians on the back for having 55 years ago taken two-thirds of our town out of commercial play with the National Seashore. But again, we get no credit. It never went to Town Meeting. In fact it was a federal taking, widely opposed in non-binding hearings before it was voted into law. From the tenor of those hearings, it’s clear that had it gone to Town Meeting, we would almost certainly be developed coast-to-coast (which wouldn’t bother some even today).

We take pride in controlling our future through Town Meeting’s pure democracy. But it’s interesting to be reminded of the other things we love about our town we enjoy because not everything goes to Town Meeting.

One important issue we will get a chance to debate in Town Meeting (on April 25th) is raised by the article asking us to eliminate our bylaw outlawing formula businesses because Land Court overturned it in approving Cumberland Farms’ proposed enlarged store and gas station. That bylaw was a good thing we did for ourselves and our town’s future and if we don’t find a way of getting something like it back on the books, it would leave us unprotected in a way that could have a most unfortunate impact on our future.

 

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