Arlington Town Meeting

06 May 2003


Mr. Dunn has his take on last night's session up.

His comments hit just about everything I would have said, so I only have a few things to add:

  • If there was a real chance TM would have stayed all the way until 23:00 when starting at 19:30, I would have been in favor of a 19:30 start. The extra half hour per session would have allowed us to take care of a lot of extra business in each session, given the high overhead of getting a session going. However, at the first night it seemed pretty clear to me that the sense of the meeting was that if it started at 19:30 it would end at 22:30 and not work an extra 30 minutes.
  • At the time I made my amendment, I had no sense of which time would be chosen. But once the person after me spoke to complain that he felt the change was unfair to people who ran for TM or decided to continue with their terms based on the entirely reasonable assumption that the start time would be 20:00, I was pretty sure that the 20:00 start time would hold up.
  • Absent some radical change or announcement, I too plan to vote against the AHA substitute motion on Wednesday. Their motion, while well-intentioned, strikes me as half-baked. Not in the "that's crazy talk!" sense, but in the more literal "it's not done yet" sense. The AHA presentation gave me no sense that they had run their proposal through anything close to the level of analysis the SAC proposal has been through. As Mr. Lyons perhaps unintentionally said, the project is a "house of cards", and I would prefer to not disturb that with competing proposals, especially when one appears to me to be much less thought out than the other.
  • I would love to know what the deal is with the AHA and its relations with SAC and the Arlington Redevelopment Board (ARB). The hostility toward SAC and the ARB emanating from Ms. Worden during her presentation was palpable. I am curious if this is a long-standing institutional rivalry, or if Ms. Worden has a particular beef, or something else. Well, I suppose that is part of the fun of being a TMM -- discovering and trying to ferret out the reasons for the various interesting if not always explicable grudges between various pieces of Town government.

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