They Moved the Meeting to Four O'Clock and Nobody Called It a Reform

On 12 March 1974 the town council voted five to one to move its regular meeting from seven in the evening to four in the afternoon. The minutes give the reason: overtime for the clerk and the custodian. The discussion, as recorded, runs to two sentences. There is no other business of note that night.

It is, on the evidence I have been able to assemble, the most consequential political act taken in that town in the fifty years I hold records for. I want to spend most of this essay on one document, because the document is the argument and summarising it would be a way of not making it.

The document is the roster of council members, with occupations, which the town published annually in its report until 1991. I have transcribed 1965 through 1985. There are nine seats.

In 1965 the nine were: a dairy farmer, a machinist at the plant on the river, the owner of a hardware store, a schoolteacher, a foreman at the same plant, a housewife (the report's word), a dentist, a man listed only as retired, and an insurance agent. Two of those nine — the machinist and the foreman — worked shifts. The teacher was out at three thirty. The farmer's afternoons in summer were not free but his evenings mostly were.

1968 and 1971 look much the same. The occupations rotate; the shape does not. There are consistently two or three people on that council who worked with their hands for an hourly wage, and there are consistently four or five whose work was their own to schedule.

Then 1974, the meeting moves, and the roster begins to change — not at once, because terms are staggered and nobody resigns over a meeting time. It changes at the next election, and the one after.

By 1979 the nine are: the hardware store owner, still; the dentist, still; two people listed as self-employed; a real estate broker; an attorney; a bank branch manager; a housewife; and a man who is a supervisor at the plant, which is a salaried position, not a shift. The machinist's seat went to the broker in 1976. The foreman's seat went to the attorney in 1978.

By 1985 there is nobody on the council paid by the hour.

I want to state plainly what that does and does not establish, because it is very easy to overread and I have watched people do it with this exact kind of series.

It does not establish intent. The minutes say overtime, and overtime was real — the town was in a bad budget year, there is a separate line of correspondence about the custodian's hours, and a four o'clock meeting genuinely saved money. I have found nothing suggesting anyone in that room wanted a different council, and I have looked, including through the personal papers of two of the five who voted yes.

It does not establish causation in the strict sense either. The plant on the river shed about four hundred jobs between 1974 and 1982, which changed the town's occupational composition independently of anything the council did, and any honest account has to put that first.

What it establishes is that the composition of a governing body can be substantially determined by a scheduling decision recorded in two sentences under a budget rationale, and that the decision will not appear in any account of that town's politics because it does not look like politics. It looks like housekeeping.

That is the general point and I would make it about the school committee's move to a Tuesday, and about the requirement that candidates file in person during business hours, and about the abolition of the paid stipend in 1988 on the grounds that public service should not be compensated — a decision that reads, in the minutes, as a small act of civic virtue.

Each of those is defensible on its own terms. Each is also a filter, and the filters compound, and none of them is ever debated as a question about who governs, because the question in the room was always about a budget line or a principle.

Now the objection I take most seriously, and it is one a colleague made to me sharply enough that I rewrote this twice. Council seats in a town of four thousand were never representative of anything. Nine people out of four thousand is not a sample; it is a small group of the civically inclined, and the 1965 version — with its dentist and its insurance agent and its housewife — was hardly a cross-section either. Reading the loss of two hourly workers as a democratic collapse imports a standard that was never met.

That is right and it narrows what I can claim. So: I am not claiming the council became unrepresentative. I am claiming it became differently unrepresentative, along one specific axis, as a result of one specific decision, and that the axis it moved along — whether a person's time is their own — is the one that most reliably tracks who ends up in a room.

The one vote against was cast by the machinist. The minutes record the vote and not the reason. He served out his term and did not stand again in 1976, and the town report for that year lists him as having declined to seek re-election, which was the standard formula and was used for people who moved away, people who were ill, and people who had simply had enough.

I have his obituary. It is four inches long, from 1994, and it mentions the council service, and it does not mention 1974, and I have no way now to find out whether he understood what he was voting against or was simply annoyed about the time.