I’m now done presiding over my first town meeting as Moderator. Overall, it went rather smoothly. There was an odd case that Town Meeting was mad that nobody from the Water/Sewer Commission was there to answer questions, so they didn’t pass the sewer budget at first, but eventually it was motioned to reconsider (once a representative from Water/Sewer was there), and I eventually allowed the reconsideration, which passed. Reconsideration is a tricky thing, as it’s helpful to allow it if a good reason exists to believe that Town Meeting has legitimately changed its mind, but one wants to not let people abuse it to lengthen meetings and try to change things once some people leave and the house is stacked in their side’s favor. In this case, I decided that there wasn’t enough debate and that cooler heads existed at this point in the meeting, and there was good reason to believe that the Town would change its mind, so I allowed it.

A lot of people came up to me after the evening and said I did a great job, so I guess I must have been alright.

I believe that a video of the meeting will be playing on local cable access eventually. I hope to watch it to see how I looked. If there’s interest, I might be able to make a recording available to others (I think it would fall under Public Domain, but that’s not immediately clear to me).