Town Meeting Reimagined Update - March 1, 2025

The Town Meeting Reimagined Taskforce plans to meet via Zoom on March 10th to continue our discussion of the comments and suggestions we have received about this first year of a new process of creating a town budget and approving public questions. After we have considered the feedback we plan to provide recommendations to the Selectboard regarding improvements to the process for the FY2027 budget process.

Thank you to all those who have sent us comments. If you’d like to offer your thoughts you still can! Email either task force co-chair (david.barrington@uvm.edu or gsym@together.net) or click on “Leave Feedback” here: https://jerichovt.org/jericho-town-meeting-2-0?tool=survey_tool#tool_tab

As a general recap of the process for 2025:

At the 2024 Jericho Town Meeting, in March of last year, voters approved these motions:

Article VI "Shall the Town adopt all budget articles by Australian Ballot with the Selectboard directed to hold a hybrid format budget review meeting to allow citizens to adjust the budget proposal." AND
Article VII "Shall the Town adopt all public questions by Australian Ballot with the Selectboard directed to hold a hybrid format review in order to allow citizens to provide amendments."

Afterwards the Selectboard set up a taskforce to recommend and implement a process that lived up to the directive in those motions and reflected the debate at Town Meeting, 2024.

That work turned out to be complex, because of relevant state law and policy, time constraints of warning the budget and printing the Town Report, and the technology required to enable folks to follow the discussion and participate both remotely and in person. As it turned out, in 2025 there were no Selectboard-initiated public questions, so the second motion was not put into play this year.

The Selectboard approved the Task Force's recommendations and asked the group to lead the work to implement the new three-step process. It began with an October 5th “Kick-off” brainstorming meeting at the high school library. The second step was a January 23rd Budget Discussion attended by about 65 to 70 people in person, another 40 to 50 on Zoom, and about 75 who watched either through Live-Stream or the recording through MMCTV. Only those attending in person or through Zoom could actively participate by asking questions, making comments or expressing a vote.

The Jericho annual town report has now been mailed to everyone in Jericho and is also posted online. It contains the final budget as adjusted by the selectboard in response to the citizens’ input at the Jan. 23rd meeting as well as a report from the task force detailing the changes between the draft and final budgets.

The third step in the budget process is the Australian Ballot vote on March 4th.

All the reports and notes of the taskforce are available at the Town Meeting Reimagined page of the Join in Jericho website.

As this was a first, the process had its glitches. The taskforce is digesting the feedback it has received about this first year and plans to provide recommendations to the Selectboard for next year. Thank you for any comments that will help that ongoing work.