More than anything else I hope, maybe a lot of people hope, that the Selectboard can come to function as a unified body.  Not that they all need to have the same beliefs and opinions about everything.  Unified in the sense of a mutual desire to listen to and bring out the best in each other.  A body that can consider matters in such a way that, even if they don’t entirely agree with one another they know they have reached the best possible conclusion they can.

Tradition dictates against that.  The modus operandi of the Selectboard, as I have observed it for the twenty-five years I’ve been in town, is five separate people vying to prevail.  The result is that they quickly tire of their own “deliberations” long before anything is fully discussed or analyzed.  At that point, having grown impatient and irritable, one of them calls for a vote and whichever three find the same solution least disagreeable determines the final decision.

Since Vermont is one of the 17 states to (finally) decriminalize possession of marijuana, one could say that the Legislature and governor should be patted on the back for doing the right thing.

But wait. Not so fast.

Is decriminalizing marijuana really an admission of guilt and culpability in criminalizing people who were not criminals before?

Hey folks, this debate on the town budget and property tax rate has spurred me to register here and join the conversation, as my schedule does not permit me to attend meatspace meetings at this time.

Let me say first off that my fiance and I, as well as every friend and neighbor in town that I’ve talked to about the issue, voted and/or reads the budget rejection not as merely a repudiation of the police and fire project, but rather as an outcry against the exhorbitantly high tax rate in Brattleboro in general.   There seems to be some debate on whether the rejection of the vote was asking for a scalpel to excise the police and fire project or a wider issue.