The scene at the Nantucket High School auditorium is a familiar one. Residents trickle in, pick up their warrants, and sit among peers, all waiting for the sound of the town moderator’s gavel. This is an hours-long affair. There are the contentious articles that have dominated the Nantucket Current for months—the short-term rental proposals, articles aimed at curbing fertilizer use and expanding the town sewer, major town appropriations, and home-rule petitions that will head up to the State House for a vote. Look around and someone will be knitting. Someone else might be playing a round of town meeting bingo.

Twenty years ago, political scientist Frank M. Bryan described New England town meetings as the last vestige of true democracy, the only form of government left in the U.S. that resembles the one-person-one-vote governance of ancient Athens.

But as Joe Grause looked across the tightly packed auditorium at a sea of over 1,000 registered island voters, he couldn’t help but think it’s time to move on from town meeting. “I thought this past town meeting was a disaster,” said Grause, a former member of the town’s Finance Committee and the chair of the newly created Town Council Study Committee. “A two-hour debate on short-term rental articles, and people don’t know what we’re voting on, people in the [overflow] room didn’t know what was going on.”

The first town meeting in the country took place in 1622 in Plymouth. For centuries, towns across New England and New York adopted a town meeting form of government, where all eligible citizens could gather to vote collectively on the issues facing their communities. Over time, as those municipalities grew, some of them shifted toward town council and mayoral systems—while across the country, the annual tradition of town meetings has become increasingly rare.

One of those cities is Aspen, Colorado, a city of nearly 7,000 year-round residents and a $160 million annual operating budget. Perched in the Rockies and dependent on seasonal tourism, Aspen is in many ways not unlike Nantucket. The difference is that Aspen, for decades, has elected a mayor and city councilors that meet twice a week to serve as the city’s legislative body.

“The huge advantage we have is we’re nimble and can respond quickly because you have an elected council working with constituents and a professionally trained city manager,” Aspen city manager Sara Ott said. “If I have an emergency repair on a utility line I can authorize it and move forward.”

Closer to Nantucket, city councils are few and far between. None of the six towns on Martha’s Vineyard have made the change from open town meeting to town council, and only one town on Cape Cod has done so—and has found some success in the process.

“All things being equal, I think our system is a more equitable and rational way of approaching things,” said Betty Ludtke, a member of the Barnstable Town Council. Barnstable, the Cape’s largest town, adopted a charter change in 1989 to do away with an open town meeting in favor of a 13-member town council. In its first year, 105 residents returned nomination papers for a shot at the town’s inaugural town council, The Barnstable Register reported in May 1989. That council, like Aspen’s, meets twice per month.

“I don’t think it makes a lot of sense to continue [town meeting] when you could do something else,” Ludtke said. “Unless everyone shows up [to town meeting], then the system is flawed.”

Last year, voters at Nantucket’s Annual Town Meeting voted overwhelmingly on a citizen’s article drafted by Curtis Barnes to form the Town Council Study Committee, which Grause chairs. That committee is now tasked with drafting a proposal to do away with Nantucket’s form of town government in favor of a town council, a city structure of government that 14 communities in Massachusetts that still call themselves towns—including Barnstable—have adopted.

The issue with town meeting, for a growing number of town officials, boils down to three main points. Nantucket’s town meeting warrants often become too complicated to be effectively voted on at a single open town meeting; major appropriations, bylaws, and zoning amendments are voted on only once, or sometimes twice, per year; and the very nature of the hours-long meeting precludes residents from attending.

“We’ve outgrown town meeting,” Select Board chair Brooke Mohr said. “Town meeting is a difficult way to participate in town government because it requires many hours to engage in the entire process. Our warrant is [roughly] 100 articles long—that’s a lot to engage in. It’s asking a lot of an individual who has other commitments in life.”

The issue of representation, or a lack thereof, has become one of the predominant criticisms some town officials have of the open town meeting. That issue becomes even more evident several hours into the annual meetings, when often, after contentious articles are decided, a sea of one-issue voters spark a mass exodus from the crowd. After several hours, attendance often dwindles even more.

At the 2024 Annual Town Meeting in May, 1,137 residents voted on the first article that came up for a vote—a ban on corporate ownership of short-term rentals—representing just under 14 percent of registered Nantucket voters. By the end of the meeting, fewer than 250 voters remained in the auditorium. Attendance was so dismal at the Special Town Meeting in 2018 that the lack of a quorum kept over $35 million in appropriations from reaching a vote.

“I found that open town meetings were long, drawn-out affairs where you have good attendance the first day, but by the end of the meeting you have 2 to 3 percent of the voters; it’s inappropriate,” Grause said. “The issues facing town are too complicated, too big, and because you have a core group of people who like to go to town meeting, you have issues decided by a few hundred people.”

In June, the town council committee voted unanimously to recommend moving toward a town council form of government. Changing to a town council requires an official charter change, starting with a vote at a future town meeting and at the ballot box. If voters approve those measures, Nantucket would likely adopt a nine-member council including six island residents elected by precinct and three islanders serving at large, committee members said. Town councilors would serve four-year terms, with a maximum of three terms per member. The five members of the Select Board at the time would automatically roll over onto the council for the remainder of their terms. The Select Board itself would cease to exist.

But changing decades of tradition has not sat well with everyone. “We have a democracy right now. Let’s try to keep it,” Herschel Allerhand said at the 2023 Annual Town Meeting. “I don’t know why anyone would vote to give up their voice,” Mary Bergman added.

“There’s no silver bullet,” Select Board member Matt Fee said. “All these issues we’re having, they don’t magically disappear. If we have trouble finding staff, if staff is having trouble getting work done, then changing town meeting isn’t going to change that.”

“Being a council member is more than American Idol,” he continued. “It's more than who sang the best today. It’s more than who had the best presentation. It’s understanding how things are supposed to go, the best practices, the history, and not just who sang the best today. Those positions have a lot of responsibility.”

Greg Milne, an associate member of the Cape Cod Municipal Leader Association and a Barnstable resident, initially opposed Barnstable’s transition from a representative town meeting to a council in 1989. Pivoting to a council would make Nantucket a city, he argued, whether it wants to be one or not, and regardless of what Nantucket calls itself.

While Milne has come to appreciate some aspects of the city form of government, namely the speed at which major decisions can be made, he also sees a “fatal flaw” in the format. That flaw, he argued, is that Barnstable councilors are elected by precinct, meaning neighborhoods are represented equally at council meetings. Major policy should not be restricted to one person per precinct, he argued. Those policies and decisions should be made by members elected at large, he said.

Another issue: The meetings themselves are not always well attended.

“They’re usually only attended by people who want to make a public comment,” Ludtke said. “People don’t routinely attend.”

Brooke Mohr made a similar case in considering the possible strengths of the town council. She said she was not convinced a town council form of government, in practice, would actually increase true participation in the debate over issues.

“Folks who cannot or do not choose to participate in town meeting are basically giving their vote to the people who come,” she said. “They are basically assigning their vote to others in a really informal way. In a town council, they would still be assigning their vote. Either way, they are having to choose or are choosing to have someone else represent them. The question is in what manner of representation do we do this?”

Under Massachusetts state law, municipalities must have at least 12,000 residents to be considered a city. Nantucket, with its year-round population of over 14,000, according to the 2020 U.S. Census, fits the bill for that classification, meaning it could elect a mayor, if voters opt for the change.

If Nantucket were to adopt a mayoral form of government, the island would also retain a council, with a mayor overseeing administrative functions, developing an annual budget to be voted on by a council, appointing department heads, and in some cases, vetoing acts of the council, according to the Massachusetts Municipal Association. Alternatively, Nantucket could opt for a town council without a mayor, instead pairing the council with a town administrator to oversee procedural responsibilities.

“With a town council, decisions will be made faster,” town moderator Sarah Alger said. “I think it’s always a good idea to look at what you’re doing and see if there are better ways to do it. But if you go to a town council form of government, there’s much less representation. First of all, you’re not going to speak for yourself, you don’t have a vote.

“If I wanted to live in the city, I’d move to the city,” she added. “If it’s going to operate like a city, why wouldn’t it feel like a city? Then you wouldn’t have to participate at all and you’d have no obligation, you could be alone and anonymous like you could be in the city.”

As Nantucket’s Town Council Study Committee continues to mull over the idea of a town council, another question remains: When could the change be made? While Grause said his goal is to draft an article for the 2025 Annual Town Meeting, town manager Libby Gibson doubts that timeline is likely.

“Even 2025, in my opinion, is not enough time because there’s a huge amount of outreach that needs to be done and most towns that have switched their forms of town government have taken several years,” she said.

Fee, who was reelected to his fifth term on the Select Board in 2022, believes the task at hand is to keep studying what a town council would look like on Nantucket.



“Be careful what you wish for,” he said. “Why are we so successful? Well, it’s partly because you preserve things. You take care of Nantucket, then the economy and everything is taken care of.”