To the editor: 

At 7 p.m. on Wednesday evening, May 28, the taxpayers of Barrington will meet at Barrington High School for the town’s final Financial Town Meeting to review, amend and approve the Committee on Appropriations’ recommended municipal and school department budgets for Fiscal Year 2025-26, along with the resulting tax levy and tax rate. 

Beginning next year, in 2026 (a result of Nov. 2024 voter approval to change the town charter) taxpayer votes on the budgets will, instead, be handled through a Financial Town Referendum (FTR) scheduled for Wednesday, May 27, 2026. Details of how that new review and approval process will work are still in development.

Barrington taxpayer opinions about our FTM vary widely, and as Barrington’s current town moderator, I’m not here to debate the merits of an FTM vs. an FTR. Instead, I’d like spend a moment reflecting on the FTM’s history in our town, which is similar to many others in New England, and why it should be celebrated and remembered, despite shortcomings.

There are no written records of Barrington town governance all the way back to our founding in 1717 and incorporation in 1770, but we come pretty close. Our town clerk’s office has written records of town meetings beginning in 1794, and the first record of a town meeting where fiscal matters were discussed was on June 2, 1794 at the home of Captain John Martin. The writing is faded and difficult to read, but payments to Mssrs. Bosworth, Brown, Remington and several others are listed, as well as a curious entry that “Enoch Remington and John W. Love be cleared from a pool [poll?] tax in future.” 

Beyond Barrington, records go back even further. According to the book Town Meeting Time, the first Moderator of Wenham, Mass. was elected to a one-year term in 1685, and it was customary in those times to fine “freemen who owned land” if they failed to attend the meeting: “2 shillings, 6 pence for absence from ‘our Generall Towne Meeting on the first Monday in January by nine of the clock’ and a fine of 1 shilling, 6 pence for absence from other town meetings.” I think you’ll agree it’s a good thing that practice went out of favor! 

Over time, Barrington’s town meeting became our elected town council, but the tradition of convening an annual Financial Town Meeting for direct taxpayer budget approval continued until this year. So how should we be thinking about the history of our own FTM as this long tradition ends? My view is that for all its flaws, the FTM has served us well as our very own annual act of direct democracy in action that harkens all the way back to Barrington’s creation as a town. Each year for decades, even centuries, members of the Barrington community have come together, budgets are presented after months of deliberation in open meetings, motions are made and seconded, discussions follow, amendments are made, and at the end, there is a vote cast by all present.

Lucky us to have had that opportunity for so long, and I invite you to join me on May 28 as we celebrate our FTM tradition one last time.

Richard Staples

Barrington