Folks agree to disagree on business at annual town meeting

The story goes that the “town bull” was one maintained by the town via a tax levied on each cow.

That was in colonial times when selectmen in New England communities appointed a bull committee, which would collect taxes and pay one farmer in each district to keep a bull. The committee not only procured the critters but decided where they should be kept so each part of the town would have good service, who should care for them, how much the compensation was to be, and whether a particular bull should go at large or be confined.

Without one in each community, there obviously would be no calves; and the supply of milk, butter, cheese and beef all depended upon seeing to it that a good bull, ornery or not, was never too distant.

So the townspeople, in meeting assembled, cheerfully voted the cow tax as readily as they appropriated money for the schoolmaster’s pay.

Nowadays, there are taxes raised for just about everything, though we can’t recall our Maine neighbors appropriating a specific sum for bulls, of late. And we haven’t attended a town meeting in years when any amount of money was “cheerfully voted.”

One of the meanest fights at our town meeting involved a warrant item asking if voters would appropriate $100 for the civil defense director, whose duties no one (not even the director himself) could define. A whopping school budget had been OK’d without debate; so had increases in the snowplowing contract as well as town personnel pay hikes. But townspeople reckoned they couldn’t prevent, or defend against, a civil emergency for a mere $100, so why raise the sum? The resulting haggle on that issue took nearly 30 minutes to resolve.

There is at least one conundrum to confound citizens at every town meeting in the state. It might involve unexpected legal fees or proposed municipal marinas. It may concern tarring and patching of town roads or increased county taxes. On an island, the dilemma may stem from a special deer-hunting season or in another town, a firetruck reserve fund.

Voters will approve zoning ordinances even when they have no intention of enforcing them. They will vote into place an alewife harvesting plan when they haven’t seen alewives in years. They will spend money on pest control at the town wharf but won’t fund trash barrels.

They may vote to repair the roof on the Boy Scout building or mow the lots in the cemetery, but they’ll pitch a fit at requests by nonprofit agencies outside their town limits. They may complain about solid waste costs but will balk at passing recycling regulations.

Voters at annual town meetings throughout Maine are as unpredictable as the month of March itself. There are just some warrant articles voters won’t pass, if for no other reason than to bring a little discord to an otherwise harmonious meeting.

Now, that’s no town bull.