Most of the work of Town Meeting is reviewing, discussing, and voting on Warrant articles at any Annual or Special meeting. Warrant articles can cover a variety of topics, from changing town bylaws, approving budgets, or many other topics that either town boards/committees or any Town Meeting Member can submit to Town Meeting.
You’ve probably heard about many warrant articles if you’ve followed any Arlington politics, but how many articles have you really researched to see what the official reports or recommendations are?
Learn More About Town Meeting
- Town Meeting homepage with links to past year’s articles, reports, and votes.
- Official 2020 TMM member list - see who represents your precinct.
- ACMi “Town Meeting Matters” video series explaining how the 2020 Town Meeting worked for newcomers.
2020 Special Town Meeting Final Articles And Reports - November
Read an overview of the warrant articles for the virtual Special Town Meeting scheduled November 16th at 8pm on Zoom. This includes many deferred articles from this summer’s Annual Town Meeting, as well as at least one newly citizen-submitted article.
The many non-time-critical warrant articles that were deferred from the normal Annual Town Meeting will soon be considered at
2020 Annual Town Meeting Final Articles And Reports - June
I’ve posted the 2020 articles that were presented to Town Meeting in June 2020, as well as all the reports to town meeting including details of board’s recommendations on various warrant articles. In particular, due to the pandemic, the Town Moderator and others all agreed to move “No action” or otherwise defer most of the articles submitted this year, including all articles with bylaws or zoning changes. The only articles addressed in this year’s super-short outdoor town meeting were key housekeeping and financial articles needing to be passed to keep government working smoothly.
2019 Town Meeting Full Articles And Votes
I’ve parsed the officially posted warrant articles for 2019 - both the normal Annual Town Meeting as well as the simultaneous Special Town Meeting held last year. All the data from the official warrant is here, plus some helpful annotations and links to other parts of town government. This also includes official vote results for most articles. It appears that some articles were withdrawn or otherwise not voted on last year.
What You’ll Find About Warrant Articles
Every warrant article has links to the official sources on the town website, plus some additional annotations or comments that I’ve made (which obviously aren’t official). I hope to annotate this with voting data from past years as well, so someday we’ll be able to easily see how each Town Meeting Member voted on various articles. The data is all on the town website now - but it’s certainly not easy to find.
Parsing the data from the town website requires a few manual steps, and then you can run my ruby-based parsing code (offered under Apache-2.0). The rest is all handled by this website’s theme and Jekyll build.