It takes a village, or rather the 11 towns that The Hardwick Gazette covers to hold a town meeting and report about it to those same communities.
Town meetings begin long before the first Tuesday in March when select boards begin to develop budgets. They write reports on the meetings they’ve held throughout the year to conduct the town’s business during the past year.
Town meetings call on volunteers to fill positions as moderator, town clerk and treasurer, school board directors, cemetery trustees, surveyors of wood, bark and lumber, grand jurors and constables, along with many others.
Town meetings bring out volunteers and paid staff of all the organizations who write reports asking for appropriations to help cover their expenses in the coming year.
Town meeting requires citizens to show up at the meeting, at the polls, or both, where they make their wishes known in discussions, sometimes heated debates, and through their votes.
What happens at those meetings is photographed, filmed and copied down by town clerks. Reports of the meetings and votes will guide the town through the coming year and appear in the next year’s report, starting the cycle all over again.
Newspapers typically keep themselves out of the spotlight in most stories that appear in their pages. At most, a newspaper might refer to itself in the third person. Today, I’m going to break that wall and talk about this digital newspaper, The Hardwick Gazette.
In these first few months of the now free and nonprofit Gazette, we assembled our own village of people who gathered information from the 11 towns we cover.
That village included board members who reached out to each town asking for information before the meeting and as soon as humanly possible afterward.
Citizens in many of those towns, working as community journalists, wrote stories about what went on before, at, and after their meetings.
UVM students joined us. Working as community journalists, they too reported on plans for the meetings. On Town Meeting Day they traveled around the area taking photos for the paper and reporting on the meetings themselves.
Those involved included town clerks and select board members who let us interview them, then sent us town reports, ballot samples, and the results of Australian ballot votes as our paid staff of two and I worked past midnight Tuesday to put together as comprehensive a report as we possibly could.
This past week we posted some late-arriving stories to our website that appear in this edition of the paper.
I can’t begin to calculate how many people are involved in making town meetings happen, but every one of them is important. Equally important to us are all of the people who stepped up to help fill our pages with the news of Town Meeting Day in 11 towns.
Thank you to everyone involved in what may not quite have been a heroic effort, but sure came close.
Paul Fixx, editor
Paul Fixx is editor of The Hardwick Gazette and lives in Hardwick.
