(Delivered Friday Sep 8, 2023 to Town of Acton employees)
Good Morning! I hope your morning has been as fun as mine.
The most important thing I have to say is “thank you for all you do” but I get almost 10 minutes up here, and it would get boring to just say thank you, over and over again, so I’m going to add a little bit of context. A little bit of history, a little bit of commentary on how things are organized now, and a tiny sprinkling of speculation about the future.
It’s 1610. If we’re living here we are people who speak an Algonquin language and we are part of the large tribe known as the Massachusetts. Our great Chief is currently Tahatawan, and this time of year Tahatawan has assigned us an area in Acton for our family grouping to hunt and fish.
A couple of decades later diseases brought in by European settlers have decimated our population causing a lot of rearrangement of what tribe we are in, who our chief is, where we live, and where we get to fish and hunt. Most family bands consolidate mostly to the West of here. The area just west of here is known as Nashoba. The area Chiefs sign paperwork with European settlers to give over control of a big area that includes present day Acton, Concord, Sudbury, Lincoln and more.
It’s 1725. if we live here, we are European settlers, or their descendants, trying to make a living on our land, by farming mostly, or maybe working in one of the mills. We are one of just a few dozen families living here and each Sunday we are required to travel all the way to Concord Center to go to the mandatory church services. That’s enough of a pain that we go to Concord and then the Commonwealth legislature and say “Hey, how about we build a meeting house where we can go to services and we will hire a minister. What do you say?” Concord and the legislature allows the creation of Acton in 1735. In addition to church services, we have Town Meetings in that new meeting house where decisions about how to run the town are made by all the residents, or more precisely, since it is 1735, all the land-owning white men. At first, the only employee is the minister. We do have a three-person Select Board chosen from the town meeting members, but no Town Manager. There are some very part-time jobs for certain specialized important roles like the constable, the assessor, the clerk and the moderator.
It’s 1845. The train now makes it all the way out to Acton and beyond, the new noises pissing off Henry David Thoreau who is camping out near Walden pond at that point. The trains allow the expansion of the industrial operations and the mills around Nashoba Brook and Fort Pond Brook. The Town starts hiring more people, but we’re still working out the budgets line item by line item at Town Meeting.
After World War II, people who commute to the Boston area start moving into Acton in big numbers with their families, and Acton makes a rapid transition from being a town to being a suburb, doubling in size each decade for three decades. Increases in population leads to increased complexity. More people are hired and finally in 1969 Town Meeting adopts a new charter that allows the hiring of our first Town Manager, and an expansion to 5 selectmen.
Today, with a vibrant and skilled staff of more than 250 people, an excellent Town Manager, a 5 person select board, and almost 50 volunteer boards and committees, we are a complex organization trying to do our best.
So, I want to take a pause to say “Thank You” again. We are in a time when many people don’t understand or appreciate the work you do; the complexities you deal with every day; in a situation constrained by the realities of our budget. You are getting so much important stuff done. Thank-you.
The boards and committees, including the select board, proceed openly and democratically to make recommendations, permitting decisions, policies, and a very small set of staff appointments. That democratic aspect means the volunteer side of the operation moves relatively slowly and deliberately, taking time to have public input and have open debate about alternatives. The employee side, on the other side, needs to work much more quickly and decisively. You are organized via an organization chart that gives individual people or departments clear authority to make important decisions and execute complicated projects that often can’t wait for a long public process. The big differences in speed between the volunteer side and the employee side requires a good synching-up process. That’s the job of the Town Manager and the Select Board. Think of us as the transmission between the volunteer side and the employee side.
I believe the most important annual decision made by the Select Board is our annual list of short and long-term goals, where we take public and staff input and create a list of priorities. The Town Manager then has the job of working with the department heads to work out how what combination of budget and personnel allocation can best get these goals accomplished while still doing all the other regular work that needs to get done because of the multitude of requirements from state regulation, union agreements, the health and safety of residents, etc.
You can see the last few years of goals linked from the select board web page. This year’s top three short term goals are:
- Make progress with Great Road safety and complete street improvements
- Advance efforts to study and implement services and programs that address housing insecurity
- Explore ways to diversify and expand our public transportation program
There are many more (probably too many more, but that’s a story for another day) that cut across most of our departments.
What happens from here? I did the brief history review to remind us that our structures keep changing. Change doesn’t stop now. Some possible changes to consider:
- Do we find a way to add more democracy to the employee side without slowing down the need for quick and certain decisions?
- Do we find a way to add more professionalism to the volunteer side, while still keeping the process open and democratic ?
- The internet has enabled many-to-many communication (and then distorted it by creating advertising driven social media), and we’ve only begun to figure out how that changes what we do.
- Right now, it is more and more difficult for those that work in Town to live in Town, or even in nearby Towns. What sort of transformation will allow that to change?
- The climate struggles we are being driven into may mean that larger systems around us may be changing or even collapsing, which will call on all of us to build more resilience and interdependence within our town and our region.
Whatever the future may bring, I know this group is ready to meet the challenges. I’m proud to be a part of the municipality of Acton, alongside all of you, doing our best to understand and meet the needs of a 21st century Acton. Thank-you.