In Vermont, Town Meeting Day is officially March 4th, and on March 4th, my small town of Poultney officially met and cast our ballots on all of the issues before us.
But with the yearly budgets passed and the officers elected, it was time to hold our real town meeting to discuss the long-term future of our town.
With the impending dissolution of Green Mountain College as a legal entity, we have lots of concerns about how our town of roughly 3,500 people will survive and thrive without the millions of dollars the college deposits into the town each year through property taxes, water and sewer payments, mortgages and rents, grocery checks, restaurant bills, hardware supplies, cups of coffee, four packs of beer, etc.
It’s a scary moment, and we need help, which was why representatives from the state of Vermont, various Federal agencies, and a variety of non-profits came to the meeting as well: because people genuinely want to help.
We scheduled the meeting for 10:30 AM on a Thursday, not the most opportune time for anyone with responsibilities, but roughly 200 people still found time to walk away from their jobs and depart from their routines, and show up.
I left the meeting feeling incredibly inspired.
Nothing got decided, and lots of questions remain unanswered, but the sense of democracy I experienced left me inspired.
The youngest attendee was in diapers, and when she started crying, her mother brought her into the hallway, but the mother then stayed by the door, helping others to hear while still trying to listen.
The oldest was…well…suffice to say, I sat next to at least a few great-grandmothers and fathers.
But there was also everybody in between. Recent and not-so-recent college alum (such as myself) who elected to settle in the community. Recently arrived retirees concerned with the health and wealth of the land they’ve chosen to call home. Lifelong townspeople with businesses, political offices, and seats on the chamber of commerce. Radically polyamorous twenty-somethings. Hardworking middle-aged tradesmen. Powerful women of color. A man whose first public thought for the campus was to create a safe-haven for refugees. An orange-blazer wearing member of the select board with a long list of entrepreneurial ideas. A green-flannel-wearing pseudo-intellectual with more dreams than he knows what to do with. A working mother, tasked with cleaning the room after we’ve gone, standing with us, listening and having her say, because she too is one of us.
We started with the challenges.
We asked ourselves, what are some of our biggest concerns? I shared my concern about the vibrancy of the community being diminished without the constant rejuvenation of newly arrived students and deciding-to-stay graduates, let alone the joy dee vivray brought in on the tongues and talents of professors and masters of the cultural arts (I didn’t say it quite like that).
Other concerns were more concrete: who’s gonna mow the lawn once the college is gone? Who’s going to ensure the security of the buildings and prevent them from becoming a haven for vagrants, especially in this area, where we too feel the pressures of the nation’s opioid crisis? How are we going to cover our town’s financial obligations without the influx of the college’s money? How much control do we actually have over the future of our town if anyone can come in and purchase what amounts to a core part of the town’s identity?
Next came the suggestions.
Speaking as a representative of the town’s local therapeutic school, I highlighted the state’s dire need for residential mental-health facilities dedicated to serving our youth.
Others suggested a veteran’s care facility; a federally funded school for nurses that would serve as a pilot program within Sen. Sander’s nationwide call for free colleges; a multi-use facility with a community farm, rooms for rent to (say) graduate students who are looking for an idyll location to finish their dissertations in peace, or to (say) religious groups for retreats, or to (say) small tech companies looking to increase their footprint without dramatically increasing their overhead, or to (say) etc.; the establishment of a new town center with offices and seminar rooms to rent on a regular or even hourly basis, not to mention a town-wide dining hall, a nondenominational chapel, an ample-sized theatre, an indoor basketball gym, a state-of-the-art fitness center, a public pool, a large solar array, etc.
And so many more great suggestions, some more realizable than others, some more radical than others, but all of them exciting, all of them different, and best of all, all of them good intentioned.
We listened to all the good people who want to help.
We ended the meeting by inviting the representatives of the various state and federal agencies, as well as the contributing nonprofits, to share their reflections on what they’d heard. To a person, they declared their optimism for what lies ahead of us, provided we keep an open mind and enter into the process with our hearts and our heads in the right place.
Nothing I experienced at that meeting suggests we will do otherwise.
And so I left inspired, and feeling good about calling this place my home.