by Susan Zacharias, who served for 17 years as an elected member of the Weston Planning Board

This brief note explains my petition for Town Meeting to increase Weston’s Select Board from three people to a stronger and more robust board of five members.

The Select Board operates as the executive body of our town government. In Weston the Select Board is the Town’s primary policy-making body for a wide variety of issues affecting service delivery, finance, and development. It also appoints the Town Manager, Chief of Police, Fire Chief and Public Works director. It appoints members to numerous key Town committees & boards. The Board works closely with these, as well as elected boards on various important Town projects. They sort out the best overall course of action for the Town and set our strategic direction. Clearly, this is a big job, and they perform an active and critical role in our town’s management and financial health.

There are many reasons and benefits to expanding Weston’s Select Board. It will:

• Increase representation for our growing and diversifying population

• Decrease the workload of individual members and thus increase appeal to serve

• Increase scheduling availability of SB calendars to accommodate meetings with other town boards/committees for increased productivity and timely decisions

• Bring additional brain power, life experience and perspectives to help solve increasingly difficult and complex challenges

Weston’s three-member board was created in 1713 when we were a small rural town. Three hundred plus years later, our population has grown to close to twelve thousand and Weston has an increasingly diverse constituency. Importantly, Weston could see explosive growth (plus 5-10% all at once) with the building of state required affordable housing – the three proposed 40Bs. This growth will put pressure on infrastructure, services, schools, traffic, character, demographics, and our vision for the future. We will need an innovative and visionary SB to see us through Weston’s next phase.

The current three-member Select Board makes Weston vulnerable, for example, with a board of three, if any two of the three members discuss a town matter outside of an official meeting, it constitutes violation of the open meeting by law.

Moving to a five member Select Board is not unusual or unchartered territory. It is already the standard for comparable Boston area towns. Here is a list of similar neighboring towns that already have five member Select Boards:

• Wayland

• Concord

• Sudbury

• Wellesley

• Carlisle

• Lexington

For an interesting read on the 2013 shenanigans that a local 3-member select board engaged in, follow the link below. You can read the whole article or just scroll to “Push for 3 to 5 begins”. Our Select Board has never engaged in such egregious behavior, but the possibility of a similar inability to conduct business does exist when you only have three members. The fallout of the events cited in this article was that the citizens of Sudbury increased their board to five.

https://patch.com/massachusetts/sudbury/how-1-night-at-lavender-changed-sudbury

If this petition is passed at Town Meeting on May 9th it will take time to take effect. There is a substantial State review process that can take over a year. This is followed by several more steps including a town wide ballot vote, and once that is done, the two new positions would be open for the electoral process. Voting at Town Meeting is only the first step, this is a long process that we need to start now.

Please come to Town meeting on May 9th.

Vote to approve the citizen’s petition to increase our Select Board to five and help Weston strengthen and modernize its government.