By Lauren Dorsey, Staff Writer
The Woodstock Selectboard brought an important question before voters this fall: whether the town should purchase the privately held Woodstock Aqueduct Company (WAC) and fund capital projects to improve it. Facing a compressed timeline and a community wary of rising costs, the town took a unique approach to public outreach on the issue, hosting a slew of public forums that gave residents new opportunities to engage directly with town officials and culminated in two public votes, both of which passed by wide margins.
A new public outreach strategy
The Woodstock Selectboard began to discuss purchasing the WAC shortly after last year’s flooding — when the town spent ten days without potable water.
Fourteen months later, the board was on the verge of announcing a public vote. “However, the best-laid plans often go awry,” said Woodstock Municipal Manager Eric Duffy during a meeting on Sept. 23.
At the start of the month, Duffy had learned that the state required some of the grant money earmarked for the WAC purchase to be fully committed by the end of October, drastically reducing the board’s original timeline. “Needless to say, that conversation didn’t go the way I wanted it to, and there may have been a little yelling,” said Duffy.
In a rapid reshuffling, the board decided to split the public vote into two parts. The first, on Oct. 29, asked voters for permission for the town to acquire the WAC. The second, on Dec. 10, asked voters to approve bonds for three related capital projects and to acquire the Vondell Reservoir Property, a backup reservoir and hot spot for public recreation.
The board announced the new plan just 36 days before the first vote.
In addition, the water votes were scheduled in the wake of local residents’ frustration after steep property tax increases this year. Voters had rejected a $99 million bond for a new school in March, and residents filed three petitions challenging town and village ordinances this summer — the first petitions Woodstock has seen in decades. “Young and old, the tax increases that we were hit with this past year were quite dramatic, and so right now everybody’s been thinking twice about what they’re voting yes for, and what it’s going to cost them,” Woodstock resident Bettyanne McGuire told the Standard this week.
In response, Duffy suggested that the town experiment with a new public outreach strategy for the water votes: hosting a series of public forums at locations around town. “I’m sure there are other towns that have done something like this, although nothing comes to mind,” Duffy told the Standard. “Honestly, I first got the idea from a scene in ‘The West Wing.'” In season seven, a story about a nuclear spill spirals out of control. One of the characters responds by holding an hours-long press conference. “He doesn’t leave until every single question is answered, and at the end, the story kind of goes away because he gave people the opportunity to ask every single question they had,” said Duffy. “I wanted to find a way for us to do something similar, so that by the time this came to a vote, there would be no more questions. People could pass it or they could vote it down, but they would be informed.”
Over two and a half months, Duffy and the selectboard held more than 70 public forums in bars, cafes, and farmers markets around town. Duffy said at the beginning, many of the forums had somewhere between three and five attendees. “Some of them had just one person show up,” said Duffy. “A few others had more like 20-30 people.”
By the week leading up to the final public vote, however, attendance dropped off. “Everybody had the information they needed to make a decision,” selectboard member Laura Powell told the Standard.
The board found that creating space for informal, in-person discussions outside of the town hall made a significant difference. “The selectboard meetings can be an intimidating place to ask a question,” said selectboard Vice Chair Susan Ford. “We found that when people are sitting at a table across from us at the South Woodstock Store or Mon Vert Cafe, they’re more at ease, and they seemed to be able to ask us what they wanted to know without thinking that it’s a stupid question, that their neighbors will hear them, or that it’s going to be recorded on Zoom.”
The relaxed format also meant that residents and board members could have longer discussions, without running up against the time limits baked into formal selectboard meetings. “In a public meeting, they just give two minutes for each person to make a comment,” Woodstock resident Peter Shoemaker told the Standard. “With the forums, I had board members to myself for 45 minutes one time, and another time for a good hour. They really put some extreme extra time into this.”
Outcomes and challenges
The first vote drew one of the largest turnouts the town has seen for a floor vote in twenty years, and residents voted in favor of acquiring the water system by a ratio of almost four to one. “I didn’t expect to see as many people at the first vote as we did,” Woodstock Selectboard Chair Ray Bourgeois told the Standard. “I expected some, but not that many.”
It’s difficult to gauge how much of the votes’ outcome can be attributed to the forums. “We’ll never really know. We can’t do exit polls,” said Duffy. “But I do think the forums made some difference. It minimized the impact of the listserv, and it increased our ability to have constructive dialogues with people because they felt they could come and talk to us and get the answers, or if we didn’t have an answer, we’d find it out and follow up.”
Ford also speculated that the forums may have been effective multipliers, involving more than just the residents who showed up. She said some people who attended the meetings went on to share what they learned with their friends around town. “Even beyond that, I’ve since talked to a few people who never made it to a single one, but were kind of convinced, just because we did all of them and made such an effort to be open,” said Ford.
Increased understanding didn’t just flow one way. “We did change some of our decisions part way through, I think in large measure, due to the input we got at those meetings,” said Ford. For example, Powell said that the board shifted the allocation distribution between users and non-users of the system in part because of the feedback the board had heard from voters.
The board’s ability to refine the articles based on what they learned from residents during the forums may have been another factor in the votes’ success. “More than anything else, their willingness to listen and incorporate the feedback that they got deeply impressed me,” Woodstock resident Lynda Fulkerson told the Standard. “When someone feels heard, they’re often more willing to listen and to keep engaging, which is so important for something like this. It made me so grateful to have people like this on the board.”
The forums were criticized too. Woodstock resident William Boardman alleged in a post on the town listserv that they were a way to lobby voters individually, without the accountability that comes from recorded Selectboard meetings. “Why would I expect more from the Town’s highly unusual, maybe unprecedented, lobbying by coffee klatch, for which there is no public record,” wrote Boardman in October. “This looks like a clever divide and conquer tactic. And it may well work. It’s clearly an alternative to public accountability.”
When asked about the comment, Duffy rejected the claim that the forums were an attempt to evade transparency and stressed that the board still held regular selectboard meetings in addition to the forums.
Vondell tours
In the leadup to the second vote, which voters again approved by a clear majority, Ford pioneered a second type of forum — walks around the Vondell Reservoir Property. “At one of the public forums, a friend of mine mentioned that she walked in the Vondell Reservoir every day,” said Ford. “I had to confess that I’d never been there. She took me up the next week, and I was amazed.”
Ford began hosting public walks shortly after. “I think a lot of people experienced what I did,” said Ford. “When you go up there, it’s beautiful and you’re passing people all the time, and you can really see how much the town makes use of that property.”
McGuire agreed. “Seeing it in person certainly offered a lot more insights,” said McGuire. “I think those walks resulted in a lot of converts who had no idea how beautiful that property was, and what it would mean to the town if it went into private hands.”
Going forward
Duffy said he believed that the forums were effective in Woodstock, at least in part, because they represent what many residents want the town’s politics to look like. “This is how people envision this town, as a small community where people get together to talk over coffee or a drink or pizza one night and chat about the town’s future,” said Duffy. “People really seemed to feel a sense of inclusive community at these things which I think has been missing here for a while.”
On the other hand, Duffy, Bourgeois, Powell, and Ford all agreed that however effective the forums may have been, it is not possible to do them for every vote. “It was arduous for us, and we knew it would be,” said Powell. “It’s definitely not something I think we could maintain consistently.”
“I hope we didn’t create a monster where the expectation is it’s always gonna be this way, because we just can’t always do this, it’s too much,” said Duffy. “But I loved it. The best part of my day is going to talk to people and so hopefully we can find a way to keep that connection going in some form even when things aren’t as impactful as the water system.”
Finally, Duffy said that he hoped the forums would help more residents get — and stay — involved in the community. “In Vermont, the residents have a lot of power,” said Duffy. “They vote on the budgets, they vote on the articles, they vote on the funds, and at town meetings, so they have a lot of influence on what happens. I do hope that people realize that they can have an impact, they can be heard, they can be involved, and we want them to be involved in the process.”