[Rich, 14:09]
Reconsideration, your procedural trick of the day...

I thought I would mention a few things about reconsideration in case we actually take up a reconsideration motion this year (happens around every other year or so). The two most important points are that (by by-law) a motion to reconsider something can only be made once. Once the motion to reconsider succeeds (thereby re-opening debate) or fails, it cannot be made again. Accordingly, if a motion to reconsider is made and is defeated, that article is irrevocably closed. The other point is that to be able to make a motion to reconsider, you must have voted on the prevailing side. This (intentionally) leads to the quandry that if you feel a vote is going to go against you and you want to try to take it up again later when you think things are more in your favor, you carry the risk that you may well provide the other side its winning margin. Of course, TM with its prevalance of voice votes means that people must be taken at their word, since there is no way to know if a claimant really did vote on the prevailing side.

Aside from "normal" reconsideration (like wanting to bring something up again because of new information -- you will notice someone on FinComm files a notice of reconsideration on every money article), you may occasionally experience what I call tactical reconsideration, where someone uses reconsideration for the opposite of its apparent purpose -- in order to guarantee the finality of a decision.

I believe the last time that happened, it was carried out by yours truly. It was on the building moratorium article a couple of years ago. Because of the way the zoning law works, the day the article was filed it put a cloud of doubt over any permit subsequently pulled, even though TM had not yet approved it. The problem was that if approved, the moratorium would be retroactive to the filing date. On the other side, even if TM voted down the moratorium, the "cloud" would not be removed until TM dissolved (possibly a couple of months later) since the defeat could be reconsidered. So after the moratorium was voted down (by a substantial margin), I rose, made a motion to reconsider, and then urged TM to defeat my motion, pointing out that doing so would make the moratorium defeat irreversible and thus remove the "cloud" that very instant instead of it hanging around until the meeting dissolved (I checked this interpretation with Town Counsel prior to the start of the session). TM did so, lifting the "cloud" then and there.