Town Meeting: The Long & the Short of It

Town Meeting members who convened in the high school auditorium for four hours last night (with more nights to come) might be surprised -- and perhaps jealous -- to learn about some of the shortest Brookline Town Meetings on record.

In January 1899, 60 men -- only men could vote in those "open town meeting" days -- convened on a very cold Tuesday night to dispose of 22 warrant articles in just 28 minutes.  "The business was rushed through without any ceremony," reported the Boston Globe, "the voters evidently being affected by the frigid atmosphere." 

Boston Globe, January 11, 1899

Items taken up included money for the library, the schools, and the water system. The warrant article expected to be the most controversial -- placing the fire department under a fire commissioner appointed by the Board of Selectmen -- passed without any dissension.

Four years later, on June 10, 1903, 150 citizens met in balmier weather for 27 minutes, allocating just under $300,000 for a variety of purposes, about half of it put toward the town's acquisition of the recently decommissioned Boylston Street reservoir.

Boston Herald, June 11, 1903

That record lasted just 24 days. On August 4, 1903, 26 attendees at a special Town Meeting took just seven minutes to approve the ceding of a portion of Hyslop Road on Fisher Hill in conjunction with the erection of the Longyear mansion, which was being moved piece by piece from Marquette, Michigan, to Brookline.

All of these meetings took place before Brookline's adoption of the representative town meeting format in 1915. (See Brookline Votes for Representative Town Meeting for more on the change.) But if you think it's not possible to have a meeting even shorter than seven minutes with the kind of  expanded body we have today ...

... think again.

In August 1963, 100 opponents of a plan to take land for a new firehouse on Babcock Street convinced a local judge to order a special Town Meeting to reconsider the action approved at the regular Town Meeting in March. 

Town Meeting Members assembled on August 19th and, after an hour and a half of legal wrangling, moderator Benjamin Trustman banged the gavel and announced "With reluctance, I call the Town Meeting to order."

But his request, reported the Brookline Chronicle Citizen, "was met only with a bewildering silence; no one moved the question or took the opportunity for which the 100 petitioners had broken tradition and fought in the courts."

"Hence," continued the paper, "it was but a matter of seconds for one of the town meeting members to move the meeting be dissolved and have his motion seconded and adopted."

Thus, after just two minutes, ended the shortest Brookline Town Meeting on record. 

Headlines in the Boston Herald (top left) and Boston Globe (top right), both on August 20, 1962, and the Brookline Chronicle Citizen (bottom) on August 22, 1963.

Let's see 21st century Brookline Town Meeting beat that!