Let us consider the lessons drawn from Great Barrington’s Annual Town Meeting, 2025 edition.
We learned that if the town holds its meeting on a Saturday, you will come—not in droves, but in greater numbers. This year, 340 voters attended the Saturday afternoon meeting, a 26 percent increase over the seven-year average of 269, and 34 percent more than attended last year.
The Selectboard had framed the Saturday meeting as a test. The results are in, and they are conclusive: Saturday afternoons are alright for meeting. While few were thrilled with giving up part of their weekend, surely we can agree that increasing voter participation by more than a quarter is a change worth permanent adoption.
After the April Special Town Meeting, where voters declined to appropriate funds to purchase and merge the Great Barrington Fire District and Housatonic Water Works (HWW), some questioned the town’s appetite to fund projects that serve only part of our community. With the town’s overwhelming approval of a temporary $3 million Brookside Road Bridge, it is clear that the April votes were not a rejection of community investment—they were a repudiation of the two ill-conceived articles. Based on the near-unanimous support for the temporary bridge, there is every reason to believe that when the Selectboard presents a well-reasoned plan for acquiring HWW, the town will be on board.
As for the bridge, one final step remains: a Proposition 2½ override vote at the May 13 town election. Question 3 on the ballot—a copy of which can be found here—seeks approval to fund the bond issuance required for construction and installation of the bridge. There is little reason to doubt that voters will again support the bridge, but the Brookside Road community has circulated this helpful FAQ just in case anyone needs a refresher on why the project is necessary.
The Brookside Road community succeeded in its bridge-building efforts because it engaged with the town. Which brings us to this note: Town government does itself no favors by keeping residents in the dark about efforts to resolve the HWW crisis. It is a nice gesture that the town manager “addresses” HWW at the top of each Selectboard meeting—though “addresses” is generous. Mostly, we receive reports that there is nothing to report. Naturally, the absence of useful information invites misinformation. The latest? A false rumor that the town intends to buy Simon’s Rock rather than HWW.
It is time to challenge the idea that success in public affairs requires prolonged secrecy. As we saw with the Housatonic River cleanup, years of closed-door executive sessions and privileged mediations fueled distrust. Perhaps the newly seated Selectboard will try a different approach—choosing to shed light on where things stand, where we are going, and how we can get there. Otherwise, rumors mushroom when we are kept in the dark.
Town Meeting always presents a quandary: How much deference is due the department requesting new equipment or the board supporting a meticulously crafted article? The point of Town Meeting is to allow voter inquiry—do we really need another backhoe?—but we should also recognize that all proposals reach the warrant only after rigorous internal review.
This is not a suggestion that the town should favor passing out blank checks. But by the time an item reaches voters, it is worth recognizing that a request has survived multiple rounds of scrutiny. That deserves respect, but not blind endorsement.
This year, we saw the “trust, but verify” principle in action. We learned that the Department of Public Works cannot rent the large backhoe it needs and, in any event, ownership is more cost effective. We heard why an all-weather drone makes sense for our all-weather community. No one challenged the Fire Department’s request for updated radios.
The most consequential articles may prove to be the ones presented by the Planning Board; there were two, one concerning the future of Simon’s Rock and the other authorizing clustered multi-unit development.
To its credit, the Planning Board held multiple meetings over a period of months proactively addressing the campus’s zoning status, recognizing the challenges the property will face once it no longer qualifies for an educational-use exception. Continued community access to the Kilpatrick Athletic Center and Daniel Arts Center—as well as Bard’s ability to market the property—depended on preserving current uses and enabling certain future ones. The Planning Board wisely moved to “grandfather” current uses and also proposed a set of permissible future uses, some of which would require issuance of a special permit.
One resident offered a motion to make the Selectboard rather than the Planning Board the Special Permit Granting Authority (SPGA) for the new Overlay District, arguing that the former was more representative of voters. Not a new argument, and one that continues to baffle.
Both boards’ members are elected to three-year terms. Both boards hold public meetings and welcome participation—in fact, the most well attended meeting this year was a Planning Board session on the future of Simon’s Rock. The real distinction in the two boards lies not in their representative nature but in their professional expertise: The Planning Board includes a civil engineer, two architects, and one realtor (though that is double-counting one member), and, combined, its members have worked on planning for nearly eight decades. Given this planning experience, it should be evident that planning decisions belong with those who specialize in planning. Appropriately, the motion failed.
The same resident also challenged the proposed Residential Cluster Development, objecting to the 20-foot maximum separation between abutting units, proposing no maximum be imposed. But as was immediately clear to most, a “cluster development” requires that the homes be, well, clustered. Eliminating the maximum separation would undermine the entire concept. That motion also failed.
As expected, the perennial complaint resurfaced over the school district’s acceptance of school-choice students. One opponent claimed that choice-in students cost the Berkshire Hills Regional School District (BHRSD) roughly $6.38 million annually because they only bring in $5,000 each, less than the amount to educate each student. Superintendent Peter Dillon came prepared with a memorandum here. As he explained—again—the marginal cost of educating one additional student is less than the revenue received once all fixed costs have been covered. The bottom line: Under current conditions, school choice significantly benefits BHRSD and, by extension, taxpayers.
That said, if the opponent has a reasonable challenge, it is not with the marginal cost of educating one more student—it is with the structure of the district itself. School choice benefits BHRSD today because there are abundant seats to fill. But when an airline finds it is flying routes with too many vacant seats, it cuts back on flights. If the district right-sizes its facilities to acknowledge declining enrollment, the economic rationale for school choice would diminish. That is a challenge worth serious consideration.
So, what did we learn from Great Barrington’s Annual Town Meeting?
Residents like to be informed—and appear generally satisfied with the work that leads to the warrant. There will always be challenges at Town Meeting, as there should be. Bumpy though it sometimes feels during town meeting, the town gets to the right place in the end.
Last, save the afternoon of Saturday, May 2, 2026, for the next Town Meeting. Hopefully, the weather will be equally miserable.
Survey Monkey Question
Here is a link to the following Survey Monkey poll: “Should the town formalize a process to provide information concerning the acquisition of the Housatonic Water Works Company and other town efforts to resolve the Housatonic water crisis?”
Survey Monkey Results
Here is the result of the following recent survey question: “Has setting the Annual Town Meeting on Saturday, May 3, at 2 p.m., enabled you to come?”
As of publication, 53.33 percent of respondents said “no.”
