MARBLEHEAD – After Monday’s delayed start to this year’s Town Meeting, Tuesday’s 13-minute delay to allow everyone to enter the Marblehead High School Field House was received quite well, and people continued trickling inside during the pledge of allegiance, land acknowledgement and various statements.
By the Item’s 9 p.m. press time, only two motions were voted on, and both passed.
To ensure the voting clickers would work throughout the evening, moderator Jack Attridge began by asking a test question: Will the Celtics win Game 2 against New York?
The voters passed that test motion, but there was still some technical confusion that followed, resulting in an additional time delay as some people attempted to exchange their clickers.
When asked the same test question 10 minutes later, there were about 1,500 votes collected, which, based on cries throughout the room, did not include everyone. Attridge then said that he was “losing his patience with electronic voting” at 7:43 p.m., but that they would try one more time.
This time around, there were more than 1,700 votes received, which Attridge said was very close to but not quite representative of the correct number of voters in attendance.
At 7:55 p.m., Attridge announced that once everybody had their new devices, the voters would take a vote on the moderator’s motion. His motion was to allow the moderator to “extend the floor to Town Management and staff and other non-voters provided they must first be recognized by the moderator.” This was voted on five minutes later, and it passed with roughly 1,400 of the 1,700 people voting in favor.
The first point of business was to see if the voters would approve a subsidiary motion which would have allowed certain articles to be moved up in the evening. It asked for the order to be: Articles 23, 34 and 33, and then the remaining articles in numerical order, starting with Article 2, would follow. The amendment to Article 1, the aforementioned first point of business, had a three-minute voting period, and the motion passed.
Just shy of the Item’s 9 p.m. deadline, Marblehead residents were still debating the second subsidiary motion of the evening to “make a motion to indefinitely postpone Article 23.” Discussion had begun around 8:10 p.m., and many voters were still lined up, waiting to give public comment.
