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Sudbury’s Annual Town Meeting had a peak attendance of 317 residents on Monday, and 182 residents on Tuesday. How does that compare to prior Town Meetings? And how does that compare to other towns with Open Town Meetings? We pulled attendance data that was reported in a variety of places including Town Proceedings, Annual Town Reports, Town Meeting Results pages on the Town website, and recap discussions of the Select Board. We also got the official records from the Town Clerk’s office.
Next, we gathered data from surrounding towns. It turns out, there’s no standard way that attendance data is tracked across municipalities, which made things a bit difficult.
*Wayland’s attendance reporting was highly inconsistent and attendance changed dramatically over the course of their meetings. We compiled vote tallies from articles to find an approximate peak attendance when peak attendance was not explicitly reported in their minutes. Please treat the Wayland numbers as approximate counts.
It was fairly typical across all towns we surveyed for the Town to report a peak attendance number on multi-day Town Meetings, but also to change how they reported from year to year as they adopted new technologies like electronic clickers, or they just opted to start reporting the attendance on each day rather than a peak number.
Looking a bit more broadly across Massachusetts, one study in the New England Journal of Political Science found that Town Meeting attendance amounted to two percent of the adult population in the towns that they surveyed. They only reviewed data from a handful of towns, and it was published in 2020, but the general trend seems to be holding true in Sudbury and towns around Sudbury.
Of course, some towns have “Open Town Meeting” and some have Representative Town Meetings. Wellesley, for example, has a Representative Town Meeting. They elect 240 representatives in staggered terms. But a review of their scorecards (voting results) shows that they fell well short of 200 representatives/votes for most of the articles at their 2024 Annual Town Meeting.
Lexington also has a Representative Town Meeting, of no more than 203 representatives, and in 2023 the highest vote count on any article was 169. Representation at those Representative Town Meetings is a bit lower than the trend line at the Open Town Meetings we surveyed, and significantly lower when there are attendance spikes for hot-button issues at Open Town Meetings. That appears to be the case in Acton and Concord this year.
Sudbury’s Open Town Meeting attendance is in the same ballpark as a “typical” year in the last five years across neighboring towns, even if a little less robust than Acton and Concord.