Talk:Town meeting

message: I'm not sure the subsection "Communities still using town meetings" is useful here.  All Massachusetts towns, by definition, have Town Meeting.  If they don't have Town Meeting, then they're cities, not towns.  Note that some Massachusetts cities call themselves "Town", as for example what the General Court calls "the city called the Town of Watertown".  18.26.0.18 04:55, 29 Apr 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Good point - it has grown out of control, hasn't it? Why not write up what you just said into article form, and replace the list of Mass. towns with it? - DavidWBrooks 12:31, 29 Apr 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Subsection title

message: The introductory paragraph for the Massachusetts section is no introduction, and probably should be at the end of the discussion about open and representative town meetings. The article is about town meetings first, and subsidiarily, the finer points of cities and towns in Massachusetts should go last. -- Yellowdesk 05:07, 10 February 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: The whole point is that towns, and only towns, have Town Meeting.  Cities by definition do not.  Perhaps it could be worded better.  121a0012 16:20, 10 February 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Massachusetts intro city vs. town 

message: This is a bit unusual. While I like the grouping and am hesitant to change it, it isn't standard. Student7 (talk) 13:08, 7 March 2008 (UTC)
thread_title: External references for each section?

message: The CT portion appears to deserve work -- there are towns (among the 169) that still have the town meeting as the legislative branch of town gov't (what i think is implied here for all towns) but a lot of the larger ones have changed that. The relationship between towns and cities (there are 21 cities) also should be distinguished from the Mass model: every point in the state is within a town, tho most cities are coextensive with the town bearing the same name, and i think those have all "town" responsibilities vested in city officials; exceptional cases (IIRC the only ones) are Winsted, CT (city) with 70% of the population of its town of Winchester, CT, and Groton (city), Connecticut with 25% of the pop of Groton, CT. Altho i have the advantage of a hard copy of a 14-year-old copy of the Blue Book (good for identifying what to update or confirm in the on-line edition), i don't see myself as temperamentally suited to the task. But i suppose no other vol is going to show up, and i'll end up trying to not make a mess of it. For now, i'm dragging my feet. --Jerzy•t 07:24, 19 June 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Connecticut 

message: I am reading materials where grassroots democracy in traditional community or village meetings are either being supplanted or sidelined by new power centres due to advent of modern centralised democracy.
It could be possible to collect enough references to materials to create a section on this issue. Although older societies often exist under a central figure of power such as an authoritarian monarch, daily functioning of villages in such societies in the 19th century were through grassroots meetings and community elders.
Hence Jewish Anderstein (talk) 07:19, 4 May 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  Modern centralised democracy destroying traditional grassroots democracy 

message: The form of government known as Town Meeting is peculiar to New England. The picture of the "Town Meeting Hall" of Danville, California has no relation to the form of government that is the subject of the article. Indeed, the website for the "Town of Danville" says, "The Town Meeting Hall is the site of monthly Town Council and Commission meetings." I intend to remove the picture unless someone can explain how it adds to the article. Snezzy (talk) 11:31, 19 January 2013 (UTC)
thread_title:  Why the Danville California picture? 

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thread_title:  External links modified 

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thread_title:  External links modified 

message: Would someone write up a history, if only a brief one for now, of Boston's government?  Wikipedia article "Boston", perhaps rightly so, covers only the present government.  But "History of Boston" doesn't seem to cover it, either.
I mean, Boston was a town until it became a city in 1822.  In that period, did it go, say, from open to representative town meeting?  And we know that its mayor/city council structure changed at least once, in 1909.
The present article may not be the place for it, either, but I'm putting this comment here since it has a Massachusetts section.
Jimlue (talk) 19:44, 27 September 2020 (UTC)
replies: text: I agree that this article is not the place for it. There's historical info at Mayor of Boston and Boston City Council, which is a much more appropriate place than this high-level article. As it is it's way too detailed in its state-by-state breakdown. oknazevad (talk) 22:01, 27 September 2020 (UTC)
thread_title: Boston

message: As I mentioned in the above section, I find this article is a bit too detailed for an overview article. The long sections breaking down each state's implementation of the concept and its special cases are overwhelming the fundamental description, and burden the article with difficult to read passages that are best covered in separate sub-articles, not this high-level overview. Compare this article with the ones on other forms of local government (mayor–council government, council–manager government, city commission government), which are about the board concepts illustrated with examples, not poor attempts at being exhaustive litanies of every detail. oknazevad (talk) 22:01, 27 September 2020 (UTC)
thread_title: Too detailed

message: — Assignment last updated by Tjagmax (talk) 04:59, 28 November 2022 (UTC)
thread_title: Wiki Education assignment: Open Democracy

message: Despite the superficial resemblance of the topics, Switzerland != United States, and neither is a translation of the other Elinruby (talk) 13:52, 31 January 2023 (UTC)
thread_title:  Assemblée communale should not link here 

message: I removed the following paragraphs from the CT section, among other rewrites, because they are wholly inaccurate. In CT, all aspects of town meetings are determined by that town's ordinances or charter. That includes the budget process, agenda items, voting, having separate referenda, even how the meetings are moderated. There's no citation in this section, because there's no CT statute that dictates how a town must conduct its meeting. The only slightly relevant state statutes are the election statutes that govern how a town referendum is conducted, if one is even conducted.
If a Town Meeting rejects a budget, a new Town Meeting must be called to consider the next proposed budget. State law allows the Board of Selectmen to adopt an estimated tax rate and continue operating based on the previous budget in the event a Town Meeting has not adopted a new budget in time. 
They also do not exercise the scope of legislative powers as is typically seen in Massachusetts. For example, while many Massachusetts towns adopt and modify land-use and building zoning regulations at Town Meeting, in Connecticut the Town Meeting would have "adopted zoning" as a concept for the town, but the actual writing and adopting of specific regulations fall to an elected Planning & Zoning Board created by the adoption of zoning.
Each town determines the scope of what is discussed and voted on in its town meetings without any limits or guidance by the state. There aren't zoning concepts though CT requires town zoning plans. How those are implemented and voted on is also determined by each town. 
Much of the detail in the CT section is invalid. It will take time to clean it up. I'd suggest wiki editors familiar with other states' town governance review their own entries as well. CountryMama27 (talk) 20:56, 1 December 2023 (UTC)
thread_title:  Inaccuracies in CT town meeting detail