PFAS Park Needs Your Support Tuesday
Town Meeting is over. Democracy is still on the march,
I love Town Meeting.
I love the Mayer Mann ubiquity of town leaders having to respond to voters in clear words and language. I love the embarrassed looks between Selectmen—who has to catch the grenade. I love the passion and the sense of moment.
But it is mostly drama.
Recent island history has scores of articles that have passed through Town Meeting with applause and wet eyes, that later fail at the ballot box. When the time comes to actually write the check, the voters tend to think twice. Town Meeting gets a very small percentage of voters, while the town elections pull a lot more voters out of their kitchens and sofas.
This year is ripe for an upset. Two issues at Town Meeting were stacked with voters, Our Island Home and the Vito Capizzo Forever Field. In both cases, supporters rushed into the hall, made their votes, and then went home. As has happened innumerable times before.
But winning the battle is not the same as winning the war. Across the island, the week since Town Meeting has brought about happy smiles and big hugs. But the Inquirer and Mirror, as usual, frame the issue; the headline reads $206 million in borrowing. In the subhead, the editors point out that the average year-round Nantucket homeowner (rare though they may be) will see a $490 increase, while off-island investors will see an $828 increase.
If you accept that all of those good folks who want a new Our Island Home came to the meeting and voted thunderously for it, you also have to assume that the other Nantucket voters, sitting on their sofas, may not be willing to write that check. Same for the Park For All Students (PFAS). The athletes came to the meeting and voted. The sedentary folks who stayed home may not be so sure that we need to poison the future. Maybe we could just have water fights with the airport fire-fighting foam instead?
In spite of what the cocktail party polling will say, democracy, in its Mayer Mann incarnation, is a mess. Sound ideas, as approved by the best and brightest, do not always win out. Nantucket is famous for it. We only installed the jetties at the very end of the whaling period. If you and yours are hoping for more density off of Bartlett Road, the New Our Island Home, or the Park for All Students (PFAS Park), you better knock on some doors and offer some rides. $500 in new taxes is the equivalent of a dinner for four downtown.
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Well, this has fired up a discussion on Nantucket. Apparently, I must have left a mark. This is what Charlie Kirk would call vigorous discourse.
Anything spoken for and passed at Town Meeting needs to be voted on Tuesday. Including poisonous playing fields.