By Dakota Antelman, Contributing Writer
Region – Long closed due to COVID-19, town halls are finally reopening. As they do, though, meeting rooms may still sit empty.
At least three area towns are facing long lists of vacancies across the many boards that oversee their daily operations.
Moving into the fall and winter, those vacancies, some fear, could lead to cancelled meetings or slower action on everything from permit requests to policy changes.
“When we get a vacancy, we try to get it filled to avoid that situation, but we can only fill it if people volunteer,” Hudson Selectman Joe Durant said. “We don’t have a groundswell of people.”
Hudson, Marlborough and Westborough comprise that list of municipalities publicly calling for volunteers to fill open board seats.
Impacting boards composed of elected officials, these vacancies, across all affected towns, appeared when members resigned their positions before completing their scheduled terms.
“We’re fortunate to have people who are willing to give their time and effort to the community,” Durant said of those decisions. “Sometimes it just becomes too much.”
Hudson alone has seen 20 resignations since the beginning of 2019.
In Grafton, 27 board members have resigned over the same span.
Southborough has handled 11 resignations.
Though mostly consistent over the past 21 months, the pace of resignations did spike in Hudson after COVID-19 hit in March.
“Everybody’s schedule is topsy turvey,” Durant said. “Everyone is working at home or living at work…I can understand [why people stepped down].”
Beyond that, Durant, who chairs the Board of Selectmen, says Zoom meetings have been hard to conduct. He thinks that fact might have potentially pushed a few extra people away.
“You just don’t have the same feel of being in person and talking to people,” he said.
The Community Advocate got all that aforementioned resignation data by reviewing every area Board of Selectmen/City Council meeting agenda since January, 2019.
As that review yielded data for Hudson, Grafton and Southborough, it offered no pinpointed number for resignations in Westborough, Marlborough, Northborough or Shrewsbury, as those communities did not include such information within applicable agendas.
Buried within that absence of hard data, though, may actually be some good news for some local governments.
Beth Casavant, the chairperson of the Shrewsbury Board of Selectmen, said this trend of lingering board vacancies has spared her community.
“We don’t really get resignations,” she said.
When resignations do happen, Casavant adds, she sees them quickly filled.
That’s something she credits, in part, to her town’s representative town meeting. Unique in the area, that large elected legislative body, Casavant says, brings people into town government and primes them to fill positions when they open.
“Town meeting gets people in with a very basic form of participation,” she said. “…A lot of it just grows from there. People want to do more.”
Meanwhile, however, back where vacancies are a plenty, the situation is far from ideal.
Jaclyn Beaulieu, the Executive Director of the Hudson Housing Authority, says the board that oversees her office just saw two resignations last month.
Now with just three members, and an existing quorum of three, the board will have to cancel any meetings where even one person has a scheduling conflict.
Beyond that, one more member wants to resign. They’re hanging, on though, so as not to effectively disable the group.
Beaulieu wants to appoint new members. But she has no applicants.
“Right now, the town hall is closed, our community centers are closed and our offices [where we advertise vacancies] are closed,” she said. “None of that is available to us…we don’t know how to reach out to people.
To learn more about vacancies in your town, contact your local Town Clerk.
