MARBLEHEAD – After what started as a 30 minute delay in Town Meeting Monday due to technical and capacity issues, Moderator Jack Attridge took the stage to ask for a motion to reconvene Tuesday at 7 p.m. at the Marblehead High School Field House, which quickly passed.
Attridge announced at 7 p.m. Monday that the Veterans Middle School auditorium was nearing capacity. According to Fire Chief Jason Gilliland, that capacity is 1,502 people. Attridge added that “the last thing I want to do is send everybody home tonight.”
At 7:13 p.m., Attridge said they had extended seating into the gym, which, according to Gilliland, has a capacity of 1,200. By 7:20 p.m., Attridge returned to the stage to tell the audience that the gym was now reaching capacity, and that Marblehead hasn’t exceeded 1,500 people in attendance at Town Meeting since 1983.
Attridge called the capacity issue “a moderator’s worst nightmare.”
At 7:32 p.m., he returned to the stage to ask for the aforementioned motion due to these capacity issues.
“I have people in the gymnasium that are coming over here and saying it’s unfair. They can’t see from where we have them seated right now, and I can’t run an unfair meeting,” Attridge said.
Another issue thrown at Marblehead right at its start was the inability to use the voting clickers. Attridge said, “One of our two receivers that covers the gym won’t reboot. So that’s why we ended up with this problem. It’s a hardware problem with the voting devices that we use.” Since these clickers were unable to be used, when asked for the motion to reconvene Tuesday night, audience members raised their hands to vote.
