They have held online town meetings, socially distanced across football fields, and changed polling places to keep voters safe during coronavirus. Local towns are adjusting and improvising to meet the pandemic challenge even as neighboring cities slowly transition to local government’s “new normal.”
Polling places aren’t just voting sites in small towns like Marblehead. Friends exchange greetings and get caught up on family news and gossip. Marblehead voters took their polling place location changes in stride a week ago and came out to vote.
Marblehead’s 28.4 percent turnout dwarfed the 2 percent turnout Lynnfield saw in its town election that served as a civic duty warmup of sorts for last Saturday’s Town Meeting.
Lynnfield residents braved sweltering weather to spend the morning on the football field seated several feet apart from one another and listening to Town Moderator Joseph Markey work his way through the town warrant.
Markey might as well have been speaking for officials in towns across the country when he rhetorically asked why Town Meeting was held during a pandemic.
The answer is budgets have to get balanced and approved so that bills can get paid. Lynnfield, Marblehead, Swampscott and Nahant have conducted elections or held town meetings in the post-coronavirus world even as Lynn and other cities are waking up like bears from hibernation and embracing virtual meetings while municipal officials look forward to resuming live meetings.
Lynn’s zoning and planning boards did not meet from March through May even though Swampscott’s and Salem’s zoning boards managed to host virtual meetings.
Everyone is learning to readjust with coronavirus precautions remaining in place. But towns, including Swampscott which held a virtual Town Meeting this week, are forging the path for a strong marriage between technology and civil responsibility.
Towns conducted online meetings during the past three months providing access to the public and organized elections and Town Meetings even as cities with arguably more technical resources and know-how failed to keep pace with the changes required to keep on communicating during coronavirus.
Government, like businesses and other parts of the private sector, have had to make changes and towns are leading the way in showing how it is done.
